Canonical URLs and hreflang

Canonical URL

The canonical URL indicates to search engines what the official address of your article is. It is essential to avoid duplicate content issues.

How to define it

1. Open the toolbox "Canonical & hreflang" to the right of the screen
2. Fill in the canonical URL field with the definitive address of your article.

Best practices

• Always define a canonical URL if your article is accessible from multiple addresses.
• Use the "cleanest" URL (without tracking parameters, without pagination).
• The canonical URL should point to the main version of the page.

Hreflang tags

Hreflang tags indicate to search engines the different language versions of the same page. They are essential for international SEO.

How to add a hreflang

1. Open the toolbox "Canonical & hreflang" to the right of the screen.
   
2. For each language version of your article:
   Select the language from the dropdown menu (fr, en, es, de, it, etc.).
   Enter the URL for the version in this language.
   Click Add to save the language/URL pair.

Remove a hreflang

Click the delete button next to the language/URL pair to remove.

Best practices

• Add a hreflang for each language in which your article is available, including the current language.
• Ensure that the URLs of each language version are reciprocal: if the FR page points to the EN page, the EN page must also point to the FR page.
• You can also specify regional variants: fr-FR, fr-CA, en-US, en-GB, etc.

SEO impact

Next steps

• Publish on Butterfly
• The SEO score
• The Editorial Brief