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.
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
-
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
-
In my opinion, you want the juice for each article to stay with each article. I wouldn't redirect all your article juice back to the main /blog page. For me, each unique page (and article) gets its own canonical link and one line = one set of information. Article about oranges, article about apples, both canonical links. You should only get juice from same or similar pages, such as
But not
-
hey matt, thanks for the response. let me ask you this. i have a blog page with a bunch of snippets, that when clicked, lead to the full articles, (each have their own custom page/url). if i want all the juice to go to the main blog page i don't want to have canonical tags on each individual post page, right?
-
Agreed. You page can sometimes end up with query parameters as well when people link to your site, and having the canonical in place will help you avoid having duplicate content.
-
It shouldn't hurt you if it doesn't need it but assuming you have www and non-www, wouldn't that part of the canonical always help anyways? By default, you would have
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded
http://yoursite.com/notagneeded
and if you're on most common CMSs,
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded/index.php or index.html or index.asp
It would actually be pretty rare to have a page with absolutely no use for rel=canonical but I don't see why it would hurt at all.
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
-
Making html table as 'seofriendly' as possible
Hi, On my website I have a table with a list of products, on every row I have a different product and a different property on each column. The table is made with css so the html code is clean. The problem is (I guess) that google doesn't 'understand' what its inside on the table. So if I do a google search that page appears on the page 87, there is any way to improve my SEO without changing the table? Or to improve my SEO I must change the format of my content? In resume, I want to improve the SEO page of a page that contains information organized inside a table. I don't know if there is a specific answer to this question. Any help is welcome. Regards
Web Design | | jcobo0 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
Is placing an H1 tag below a slideshow a bad practice?
Hello All, It is to my understanding that it is a best practice to have a single H1 headline that corresponds to your title tag at the top of your page, above your content for the best On-Site Optimization. We are developing a site that uses a big slideshow with text on each slide, and are concerned that placing the H1 Headline below this will be a bad practice. Would a better option be to have the slide show text on the image and place no alt tags on the slides, so that the crawlers accessing the page overlook this and see the H1 below the slider first? We need to maintain the slider for design purposes, but would like the site to optimized. A similar example to what the slider will look like is as follows: http://www.boviskyle.com/ However, we look to have optimized, "10x" content below the slider with a solid H1 headline as well. Thank You!
Web Design | | Armen-SEO0 -
Spaces at beginning of title tag - negatively affect the optimization of the page?
For some reason, our title tags have a long space after the beginning title tag and before the text appears. The beginning title tag is on one line, then a break, a tab and then the content of the title tag. I'm pretty sure this is not good and is affecting optimization of the page. Am I correct or is this not an issue and does not need to be fixed? Example: | <title></span></p> <p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"> First keyword</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Is it better to redirect a url or set up a landing page for a new site?
Hi, One of our clients has got a new website but is still getting quite a lot of traffic to her old site which has a page authority of 30 on the home page and has about 20 external backlinks. It's on a different hosting package so a different C block but I was wondering if anyone could advise if it would be better to simply redirect this page to the new site or set up a landing page on this domain simply saying "Site has moved, you can now find us here..." sort of idea. Any advice would be much appreciated Thanks
Web Design | | Will_Craig0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Correct Canonical Reference
Aloha, This is probably a noob question, but here we go: I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such: Instead of: rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx" I get: rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx" Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely. Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?
Web Design | | dimanyc0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0