Canonical tag generator

What it does

A canonical tag generator writes the link rel canonical tag for a page and shows you what a clean canonical URL should look like. Paste the URL exactly as served, with any tracking parameters, fragments or mixed case, and the generator strips those, applies your www and trailing slash rules and produces the tag. It lists every change it made so the reasoning is visible, and it can also output the equivalent HTTP header for PDFs and other non-HTML files.

How to use it

1. Paste the page URL as it appears in the address bar.
2. Leave the canonical field empty for the usual self-referencing tag.
3. Set the www and trailing slash options to match how your site already resolves.
4. Check the "What changed" list to confirm each clean-up is what you intended.
5. Copy the link tag into the head, or the Link header for non-HTML files.

How to read the result

The Type badge says "Self-referencing" when the tag points to the page's own clean URL, which is the normal case. It changes to "Points elsewhere" if you enter a different canonical, and to "Invalid URL" if what you typed cannot be parsed.

The sample URL http://example.com/Services/Web-Design/?utm_source=newsletter&ref=footer#pricing becomes https://www.example.com/services/web-design after six changes: http to https, www added, path lowercased, tracking parameters removed, fragment dropped and trailing slash removed. The Changes stat shows "6" and the table lists each one. That is the address to use in the sitemap, in internal links and in the tag.

If the table says it kept remaining query parameters, decide whether those parameters change the content. A product colour parameter might; a sort order usually does not, and pages that differ only by sort order should canonical to the unsorted version.

For sites in several languages, the canonical on each version should point to itself while hreflang tags link the set. Consistent canonicals across a site are part of our technical SEO service.