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
-
Wordpress SEO/Tag plugin recommendation for sports (soccer) website
I own a Wordpress website which covers soccer in the DC MD VA area called DMV Soccer http://www.dmvsoccer.com/ We write weekly recaps where we tag a player who has scored a goal or performed well in a game. For each player, obviously, a tag is created. What I'm looking for is a plugin or solution that would allow me to tag a player, but also automatically assign a team to that player so that the team name and player's name are optimized on the individual player's tag page. So if I were to tag George Murphy on a recap, and I assign him to a team, let's say DC United. The tag page would have a title, something like: George Murphy Soccer Player for DC United and the meta description: George Murphy, soccer player from MD who players for DC United archives Or something similar, if that makes sense. Should I skip using tags and instead start assigning each player as a sub-category under each team? I'd like to try to avoid that, because not each category will be based on a player. Any suggestions in terms of existing plugins or other recommendations?
Web Design | | georgetsn1 -
How to create this image effect for my home page
How do I make a wide, somewhat fast loading image effect like this home page has: 3dcart.com work on my website bobweikel.com I'm asking for how to create the effect (with small enough image kb to load) and what the image should be of in your opinion. Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
URLs appear in Google Webmaster Tools that I can't find on my own site?!?
Hi, I have a Magento e-commerce site (clothing) and when I had a look through some of the sections in Google Webmaster Tools I found URLs that I can't find on my site. For example, a product url maybe http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/ which is fine. In that product there maybe three sizes of the product (Small, Medium, Large) and for some reason Googlebot is sometimes finding a url like: http://www.example.co.uk/product-url/1202/ has been found and when clicked on is a live url (Status code: 200) with is one of the sizes (medium). However I have ran a site crawl in Screaming Frog and other crawl tests and can't seem to find where Googlebot is finding these URLs. I think I need to: 1. Find how Googlebot is finding these urls? 2. Find out how to keep out of index (e.g. robots.txt, canonical etc.... Any help would be much appreciated and I'm happy to share the URL with members if they think they can have a look and help with this problem. I can share specific URLs which might make the issue seem clearer, let me know? Thanks, Darrell
Web Design | | clickyleap0 -
Site structure- category pages
Hi, I'm relatively new to SEO but have tried to apply all best practices to my site. However, I've hit a stumbling block when it comes to whether or not to index my category pages. http://istudyenglishonline.com/category/expressions-idioms/ General info: the site has been created with Wordpress and has a directory of English idioms. Each idiom is associated with one or more categories that it falls under (emotions, sports, food etc). Each category has its own page where the list of idioms will be. As each idiom often has more than one associated category, the same idiom will appear in different category pages, thus creating duplicate content. However, I have given each category page its own unique description. The issue is, when there are numerous idioms, the category page will have more than 1 page. I don't have the ability to create a unique description for each subsequent page of the main category. I know that the very model for some vertical search engines (such as indeed.com) is to create such landing pages and that the more "categories" that they have assigned to their job ads, in this case, the more pages created and the more pages indexed in Google. This seems to work very well for them. My question is, am I doing things right? Should I be doing anything to the subsequent category pages to avoid duplicate content? My plan was to have so many idioms associated with so many categories that I have a fair number of landing pages indexed in google, thus attacking the long tail keywords. However, I'm not sure if I am going the right way. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | villarroel0 -
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages?
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages? One of our landing pages is using five variations of the Arial font where size, strength (bold, italics) and color all vary. One camp internally believes that this okay, whereas another camp wants to standardize the presentation where there's less variance (such as a heading as one and the body copy as another). Have you been through a similar trial or test in the past? I've seen some instances of a Marketing Sherpa study on the topic, but no real numbers to support one thing or another. I've attached an example image of our current LP. I have a lot of strong opinions on a number of items - but we're looking to have an immediate internal discussion on the font issue first. Thanks! GIzA8.jpg
Web Design | | eMagineSEO0 -
Landing Page/Home Page issues
Hi. I was speaking with my designer last night (we are setting up a new website) and we were discussing the design of our homepage, now the designer said he wanted the first page of the website to be a sort of landing page page were the visitor has to click and enter, im sure everyone has all come across these before. However, I am concerned as to the SEO implications of this? Any help guys?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Setup of three major retail sites.. need advice.
I recently have taken a new position responsible for three large national retail sites which are all owned by one parent organization. Through a series of acquisitions, these three major brands have been brought under one umbrella and a brand consolidation is likely not to happen within the next 2-4 years. I have a number of questions I’m hoping to get some feedback on, but first a little more background is necessary. A year ago (before my time) the three sites were over-hauled, but were designed to use one common custom CMS and all of the navigation and nearly all the content is the same (with some exceptions, such as tags, url, etc.). All of the brands have identical products and services; however, each one services a different demographic in the US. The design was intended for ease of management, but is terrible for seo. Additionally, without the geographic reference, they all compete for the same keywords. They have now begun a very large ecommerce project utilizing an ATG platform. The initial direction is to use one platform for all three brands, but keep them on separate domains and with the use of basic switching, replace nominal content such as logos and references of the brands for each of the domains. I’m concerned with this approach and would like to hear your feedback.. When optimizing a page for one keyword set, are they likely to be filtered due to dup content? The argument that management has is that all three current sites rank very well for one keyword on all three sites. They feel it won’t be an issue due to this. One option, that is currently still available, is to tri-band one ecommerce site, but it would have to be on an entirely new domain. The other three domains are very well established and are PR6s. Management, and even I, is afraid to abandon these other domains, but having a single domain would allow us to have unique content and really leverage all efforts to one domain. Thoughts? Any knowledge or thoughts what kind of impact having three domains on one ATG platform will be? Thanks much! John If you feel it will help, please message me and I can share the urls... Also, how would you handle a company blog in this case?
Web Design | | kavaliauskas0 -
Seo for flash home page?
I have a client who insists their home page be a single graphic image of their logo with php menus linking to all of the other pages up top. This appears to me to be an seo nightmare. They seem to be unwilling to have anything to do with changing the appearance and want to rely on seo for "all the other pages" on the site. What's an SEO to do in this situation? Is it possible to have a flash image that lands on a "homepage" for google to crawl, rather than a single image? What's the best seo approach here?
Web Design | | peaceland0