(Entry was posted by Jason Hyungchul Kang on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/25/2018).

Can someone explain what is the point of using canonical?

Can someone explain what is the point of using canonical (let`s say if u somehow end up having 2 identical pages) when u can just keep the better performing page (in terms of traffic and rankings) and just simply delete the other one?

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Amit Shah: Yes you can delete it! But when you have a t shirts with different colors page then you can canonical link to main t shirt page! It letâ€™s google know that which is the main page, bcaz they all have similar contents
Christopher Shin: Canonical helps boost rankings and is one of the oldest methods used in SEO. Canonicals are worked through the source codes so that the URL can be considered by search engines as the main source of the content, hence duplicate content can be avoided, even with the same content on different URLs. When done right, you can cut down duplicate issues, pass link juice between your pages, help search engines crawl your site more effectively, and more! If NOT done properly, then you will face huge issues. Hope this helps! Good luck.
Michael Martinez: On Websites that use faceted navigation there is nothing to delete. The page URLs are generated on the fly, and a search engine may find many duplicate pages. So you assign a canonical URL to the various duplicate pages.
Becky Westmoreland: 301 redirects are better than canonical though - especially if there are unknown backlinks you don`t want to lose link equity from