Indexing & Canonicalization

Understanding how search engines index your content and how Good Gallery handles canonicalization helps you optimize your website for search engine visibility.

Indexing Content

Crawling your website, indexing content, and updating existing indexed content are processes controlled entirely by each search engine's internal rules.

There are no guarantees as to when your pages will be crawled, indexed, or updated in the index.

• For some websites, content is indexed in minutes.
• For other websites, indexed content may appear in hours or days or weeks.
• For other websites, indexing content takes months.
• In rare cases, search engines may never add certain content to their index.

Updates to indexed content often take longer than when adding new content to search engine indexes. Removing content from an index can take even longer, even when removal is requested using the Google Search Console.

Canonicalization

Canonicalization helps ensure that search engines are not presented with duplicate website content.

Canonicalization helps search engines understand your website better so that preferred content is indexed. These features also help prevent diluted link profiles when external links point to your content. Both considerations affect your SEO profile.

Except for duplicate image pages, every Good Gallery page includes a self-referential canonical link. Self-referential canonical links are helpful because they explicitly define the preferred URL. Self-referential canonicalization is also recommended by search engines.

Image Pages

Good Gallery automatically canonicalizes Gallery Page images. Without canonicalization, if the same image appears in multiple galleries, search engines would view those identical images as duplicate content.

Gallery Page images include a canonicalization tag that identifies the primary image and informs search engines which URL should be indexed.

The primary image is selected based on the position of that image in the website menu hierarchy. The image in the highest menu position is given priority.

For example, if the same image is displayed on two Gallery Pages, the Gallery Page image that appears highest in the menu is prioritized for canonicalization.

If an image only appears once on your website, then a self-referential canonical link is provided.