Google’s Gary Illyes stated on LinkedIn this morning that you must “embrace the URLs that you’d need to see as canonical in your sitemaps.” This isn’t essentially new recommendation, Google has stated this quite a few instances, however Gary had a motive to repeat this recommendation for some motive.

Gary added, “It is regular to have some duplicate content material in your website, however you need to give search engines like google and yahoo as many hints as you’ll be able to about which model needs to be canonical (I.e. proven in search outcomes). Sitemaps is a kind of hints. Not as robust as rel-canonical and undoubtedly not even close to redirects, however it may be helpful nonetheless.”

So, the strongest sign is the redirect, then rel-canonical, after which sitemap file? There are in all probability indicators within the combine, like your inner hyperlinks, exterior hyperlinks, and extra.

I imply, it’s logical to have your canonical URL in your sitemap. That simply appears logical. However I assume Gary is seeing loads of of us not doing this?

In 2016, John Mueller stated we suggest simply submitting a sitemap for the URLs that you just need to have listed, not for all variations and in 2018, he stated URLs in sitemap information are used to find out the canonical URL.

So in case you are serving non-canonical URLs in your sitemap file, attempt to not?

Discussion board dialogue at LinkedIn.