Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
-
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag.
Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place?
Thank you in advance for your help.
-Josh Fulfer
-
There isn't a direct penalty for having rel="canonical" tags on every page, no, as long as you are correctly utilizing them (i.e. don't set the href of the tag to an invalid or non-existent URL). If there is even the possibility of duplicate content on your website, it is best to use canonical tags.
For websites serving straight HTML files, both http://www.example.com/index.html and http://www.example.com/ likely serve the same content.
If you use a framework like ASP.NET MVC, it would by default return duplicate content for both http://www.example.com/ and http://www.example.com/Home/Index.
Choose one or the other and set your canonical tag to that:
(note: the trailing slash is optional - just be consistent with including it or not)
-
You can use a canonical tag on page A, to point to A, telling that this is the original, teh reason for this is when people scrape your site they will point back home.
i belive thats is what they were getting at
you would only point it at B if B was a duplicate.
-
Ryan - I appreciate your help. My initial thought too was that I could remove it to clean up the code. However, I was unaware that the tag helps with dynamically generated pages - which ours are.
Thank you for your thorough response.
-
as far as i can see josh, the canonical URLs on your site are doing what they should be doing. I havn't looked to deep into it, but it seems like your products all refer back to product category pages, so that is the right way to use them.
-
I have never heard of anyone being penalised for having it on every page. Plus I can't see that ever happening unless it has been implemented incorrectly of course.
-
page A has content about apples. page B has content about bubblegum. Canonical tag states that page B should refer to page A. What is the point of that? all link juice, all ranking potential is passed to page A, even though page B has very different content. So page A MIGHT appear in search results about bubblegum, but page B will not because it is passing all link juice and rank potential to page A about apples. People stop going to page A when looking for bubblegum because it is irrelevant, and bounce rates increase.
Dont think you need documentation to get this. If you have all pages redirecting bots via canonical urls to the SAME page, it is pointless. If you have several article about apples and point them all to page A that is a different story.
-
not sure what you mean here, I have a canonical on every page, I program my sites to dynamicly to do, the reason i do so, is if someone scraps a page, it will have my address in the canonical tag.
I dont know what you mean by not relative to the tag. it just a href, are we talking about the same thing?
rel="canonical" href=http://mydomain.com/>
-
Having canonical tags on pages that don't have any duplicate content is pointless, as it may actually stop you for ranking on keywords specific to pages not relative to the tag.
Please, may you present me a document that assess what are you saying? because it is the first time I hear this thing.
#curious
-
The disadvantage to keeping a canonical tag on a page which does not require it would be, as a rule, you want to present your web page with the least amount of code possible. Unnecessary code causes extra confusion and adds to the processing time of web pages.
I use the canonical tag on all pages, but not everyone agrees. If you would like further support, SEOmoz uses the tag on all pages as well. If you use any CMS, ecommerce software, forum software or any system which generates pages dynamically then I would highly recommend a canonical tag on every page. At times a system will generate pages which you might not be aware of, but a crawler will find.
Sometimes a page will offer a print version, the ability to sort on ascending/descending, and numerous other changes. You might think you only have one version of your page but have many versions which you do not realize exist. A proper canonical tag ensures the correct version of your URL is always offered for indexing, and you avoid duplicate content issues. With that said, if you have a basic html/css/php site and you are 100% confident in your programmer, then it is not necessary.
EDIT: In your case, it seems the canonical tags are performing a necessary function. From your home page I clicked on your featured item and I landed on the following URL:
http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c
You have the identical page offered under another URL: http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c/hotel_towels.
If you were to remove the canonical, you would have duplicate content issues on your site.
-
rel=canonical just passes all link juice from one page to the next, it tells bots to use the page specified in the tag to assess link value and page authority. Having canonical tags on pages that don't have any duplicate content is pointless, as it may actually stop you for ranking on keywords specific to pages not relative to the tag. I would look at it closely or ask the last SEO why they did this before removing them. But by the sounds of it, you dont really need them.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Looking for opinions on structuring meta title tags/page title/menu title/H1
Hi everyone I am hoping a few of you can share your opinions. I have been having conversations (okay, healthy debates) about how to write/structure meta title tag and how to compliment them with the H1, page title, menu name. To help explain the thought processes I will use a pretend keyword. How about "screwdriver". Case: (I made this up) we are redesigning a website for a construction tools manufacturing company (pretend name: ABC Tools) targeting OEMs who are interested in purchasing large quantities of tools. The product categories (to become main menu items) are Screwdrivers, Nails, Drills, and Hammers. (bear with me .... this is just an example I am making up on the fly) K. Circling back to screwdrivers - let's say we have one landing page (a primary category page and in the main menu) listing products and great details about screwdrivers. Focus keywords are screwdriver manufacturer, screwdriver supplier, construction screwdrivers Below are questions being debated. If you are willing ... how would you address these questions? And, can you explain WHY? QUESTION ONE: How would you structure the meta title tag (feel free to write one of your own) Screwdriver Manufacturer - Construction Screwdriver | ABC Tools ABC Tools - US-based Screwdriver Manufacturer Supplier Near You High-Quality Screwdrivers for Construction with ABC Tools QUESTION TWO: how would you write the H1 on the page? Would it match the meta tag? OR, would you write something different using the primary keyword? QUESTION THREE Remembering this is not a blog post ... it is a primary landing page linked to the main navigation. What would the menu title be? (remember the product categories above are how the main menu items are bucketed) Screwdrivers Screwdriver Manufacturer Typically in WordPress, the H1 and the menu title is auto-populated using the page title (not the title tag)... So, if we use Screwdrivers as the page title but we want the H1 to match the meta title tag, would we manually change the H1? Or, have the page title and title tag match, but manually change the menu item?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brenda.Haines1 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Landing pages for paid traffic and the use of noindex vs canonical
A client of mine has a lot of differentiated landing pages with only a few changes on each, but with the same intent and goal as the generic version. The generic version of the landing page is included in navigation, sitemap and is indexed on Google. The purpose of the differentiated landing pages is to include the city and some minor changes in the text/imagery to best fit the Adwords text. Other than that, the intent and purpose of the pages are the same as the main / generic page. They are not to be indexed, nor am I trying to have hidden pages linking to the generic and indexed one (I'm not going the blackhat way). So – I want to avoid that the duplicate landing pages are being indexed (obviously), but I'm not sure if I should use noindex (nofollow as well?) or rel=canonical, since these landing pages are localized campaign versions of the generic page with more or less only paid traffic to them. I don't want to be accidentally penalized, but I still need the generic / main page to rank as high as possible... What would be your recommendation on this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ostesmorbrod0 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
I have ppc landing pages that are similar to my seo page. The pages are shorter with less text with a focus on converting visitors further along in the purchase cycle. My questions are: 1. Is there a benefit for having the orphan ppc pages indexed or should I no index them? 2. If indexing does provide benefits, should I create links from my site to the ppc pages or should I just submit them in a sitemap? 3. If indexed, should I use rel="canonical" and point the ppc versions to the appropriate organic page? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandExpSteve0 -
Canonical tag - but Title and Description are slightly different
I am building a new SEO site with a "Silo" / Themed architecture. I have a travel website selling hotel reservations. I list a hotel page under a city page - example, www.abc.com/Dallas/Hilton.html Then I use that same property under a segment within the city - example www.abc.com/Dallas/Downtown/Hilton.html, so there are two URLs with the same content Both pages are identical, except I want to customize the Title and Description. I want to customize the title and description to build a consistent theme - for example the /Downtown/Hilton page will have the words "Near Downtown" in the Title and Description, while the primary city Hilton page will not. So I have two questions about this. First, is it okay to use a canonical tag if the Title and Description are slightly different? Everything else is identical. If so, will Google crawl and comprehend the unique Title and Description on the "Downtown" silo? I want Google to see that I have several "supporting" pages to my main landing page(s). I want to present to Google 5 supporting pages in each silo that each has a supporting keyword theme. But I'm not sure if Google will consider content of pages that point to a different page using the canonical tag. Please see this supporting example: http://d.pr/i/aQPv Thanks for your insights. Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | partnerf0 -
Canonical VS Rel=Next & Rel=Prev for Paginated Pages
I run an ecommerce site that paginates product pages within Categories/Sub-Categories. Currently, products are not displayed in multiple categories but this will most likely happen as time goes on (in Clearance and Manufacturer Categories). I am unclear as to the proper implementation of Canonical tags and Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages. I do not have a View All page to use as the Canonical URL so that is not an option. I want to avoid duplicate content issues down the road when products are displayed in multiple categories of the site and have Search Engines index paginated pages. My question is, should I use the Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages as well as using Page One as the Canonical URL? Also, should I implement the Canonical tag on pages that are not yet paginated (only one page)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750