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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
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 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Are rel=author and rel=publisher meta tags currently in use?
Hello, Do these meta tags have any current usage? <meta name="author" content="Author Name"><meta name="publisher" content="Publisher Name"> I have also seen this usage linking to a companies Google+ Page:Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | srbello0 -
Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
Hello, I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly. Thanks!Lauryn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john_marketade0 -
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 -
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools. The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present? The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content? And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second? I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0