Duplicate or thin content pages are canonicalized

Duplicate URLs serving the same content split ranking signals across variants, so no single URL accumulates enough authority to rank. Paginated routes without self-referencing canonicals tell Google to ignore pages 2+, stranding inventory and archive content. Parameter permutations (?sort=price, ?sort=name) multiply into thousands of crawlable URLs that consume crawl budget and dilute PageRank across near-identical pages.

Add absolute HTTPS canonical tags to every duplicate-producing template. Pagination must self-canonicalize — page 2 canonicals to page 2, not page 1. Sort/filter parameter variations canonical back to the clean base URL. Enforce a single trailing-slash policy via framework config and redirect the alternate form.

// app/products/page.tsx
export const metadata = { alternates: { canonical: 'https://yoursite.com/products' } }