Rel=canonical

[arcade88]

I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag.

Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page.

Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense.

Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.

[arcade88]

Thank you. i have set it to all pages but i will have a look for any duplicates by using Xenu program.

[CleverPhD]

You can implement it side wide on all pages, but make sure that you do it correctly.   One other added benefit is that if anyone scrapes your content, if they scrape the code that includes your canonical link, you would get proper attribution.

Also, if you do it site wide, on any pages where you do want the canonical pointing to another page, make sure that you don't overwrite those.  Example, you may have the printer friendly version of a page canonical to the original version of the page - this makes sense and is a good use of canonical.  You would not want to overwrite that canonical with the canonical to self.

Cheers!

[arcade88]

Thanks,

Okay so you recommend add rel canonical only for homepage right?

[CleverPhD]

The link that kosta list relates to the use of the rel=canonical for multi lingual pages.

I would point you to Dr. Pete (below) and I think he has good advice. I also love to eat cannonscicles, but that is another story.  Generally, you can do it, but you need to know what you are doing to make sure that you do not screw something up.

I had an issue on a site where Google was still caching old URLs on our site, even though we had relaunched the URL structure and setup 301 redirects - over two years prior.  An SEO consultant we work with suggested dropping in the self canonicalizing (sp?) links and over a period of a couple of months the old URLs were replaced in the Google SERPs and GWT report pages.

Cheers!

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

"(6) Is It OK to Put Rel=Canonical on My Entire Site?

Should you pre-emptively rel=canonical your entire site – even if many of the pages aren’t subject to duplicate content issues? I think this gets very speculative. We have recommended this approach at SEOmoz in the past, and I think it’s generally safe. I do worry that excessive use of rel=canonical could cause search engines to devalue and even ignore those tags, but I can’t point to any clear evidence of this happening. I also worry that people often implement site-wide rel=canonical tags badly, and end up pointing them to the wrong pages.

I do think that a pre-emptive rel=canonical on your home-page is generally a good ideas, as home pages are prone to URL variations. In a perfect world, I’d say to use rel=canonical on the home-page, known duplicates, and any pages with parameters that could drive duplicate content, and leave the rest alone. However, that’s often a very difficult procedure. In some cases, site-wide rel=canonical implementation is better than no index control."

[arcade88]

should i use  on every page since its a unique page?

or dont use it at all.

How about this ?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

**Update: to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.

A bit of confusion.