Plants & Flowers
A **canonical tag** (rel=canonical) is an **HTML element** that helps search engines understand the preferred version of a webpage when multiple URLs contain identical or very similar content. This is crucial for **SEO** as it prevents duplicate content issues and ensures search engines **crawl** and index the intended page, consolidating **link equity** and improving rankings. By clearly telling search engines which page is the original, canonical tags help avoid confusion and wasted **crawl budget**.