What issue does a canonical tag help to prevent?

A canonical tag helps to prevent duplicate content problems by indicating the preferred version of a webpage when multiple pages have similar or identical content. This is crucial for search engine optimization (SEO) because search engines may struggle to determine which version of a page to index or rank, potentially diluting the page authority and leading to lower visibility in search results. By using a canonical tag, webmasters can signal the primary resource to be crawled and indexed, consolidating the ranking signals and improving the page's chances of being properly recognized and valorized by search engines.

In contrast, high bounce rates are generally related to user experience and engagement metrics rather than content duplication. Outdated content listings can occur for a variety of reasons not directly tied to canonical tags, such as the failure to update or manage content effectively. Unresponsive design is a technical issue related to website responsiveness and does not pertain to content duplication directly. These other issues highlight a range of different challenges within web management and SEO but do not relate to the specific function of canonical tags in addressing duplicate content.