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better software since 1999
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Capterra Glossary
Canonical is a term that describes an entity that adheres to an original set of rules, criteria, and principles. This term is commonly used to determine whether a programming interface follows a certain standard or precedent or whether it deviates from it. The process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a standard (canonical) form is called canonicalization.
Small businesses and startups in the IT industry, often use the term canonical to distinguish standardized (canonical) data from nonstandardized (noncanonical) data. Many small to midsize businesses, regardless of the industry they operate within, use the canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a company webpage URL they want to appear in search results. After all, large scale duplication of website content can dramatically decrease a company website’s search engine ranking.