Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. When is it recommended to use a self referencing rel "canonical"?

    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.

    When is it recommended to use a self referencing rel "canonical"?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    5
    5
    14355
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • SEO_Promenade
      SEO_Promenade last edited by

      In what type of a situation is it the best type of practice to use a self referencing rel "canonical" tag?

      Are there particular practices to be cautious of when using a self referencing  rel "canonical" tag?

      I see this practice used mainly with larger websites but I can't find any information that really explains when is a good time to make use of this practice for SEO purposes.

      Appreciate all feedback.

      Thank you in advance.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JaneCopland
        JaneCopland last edited by

        As others have said above, combating scrapers is a big reason, but you're relying on lazy scrapers not removing the tags.

        Another reason is to prevent rogue content management systems from attaching unnecessary query strings to URLs, creating pages that can end up loading infinite times under different URLs. A canonical tag in the source file would mean that any number of duplicate pages point back to the original. The same reason goes for sites that have issues with redirecting www / non-www URLs to the correct version, or who deal with the same problem regarding secure / insecure URLs. In all these cases, the canonical tag is a bandaid, not a cure - it would be better to fix the underlying problem of the rogue CMS, incorrect redirection, etc. but the canonical tag (self-referencing) is there if you need it.

        Google doesn't seem to have an issue with it, but if you're at all concerned about the other engines, use with care.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
        • AlanMosley
          AlanMosley last edited by

          People do it to stop scarpers, but if your going to write screen scraper it would not be hard to remove canonical tags as well. so I don't think much of the idea.

          Bing recommends that you do not use self ref canonicals tags. It could be that a self ref canonical tag may be followed as is alluded to by Bing, meaning that lose a bit of link juice thought the redirect.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • VWE
            VWE last edited by

            You may want to just use it on every page.

            One good argument for using a self-referencing rel=canonical on every page is to combat scrapers. If they grab the entire code, including the rel=canonical, they are essentially telling the bots that your page is the original, and they'll be much less likely to outrank you for your own content.

            Larger sites tend to generate the rel=canonicals automatically for every page, and give you the option to customize it where necessary.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • OlegKorneitchouk
              OlegKorneitchouk last edited by

              What do you mean?

              Like on site.com/pagea.htm there is a canonical set to site.com/pagea.htm? No harm in that. You should have a canonical URL whenever you want only one specific version of a URL.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • india-morocco

                Move to new domain using Canonical Tag

                At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site). Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead. Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents. Thank you very much!

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | india-morocco
                0
              • benjaminleemd

                My "search visibility" went from 3% to 0% and I don't know why.

                My search visibility on here went from 3.5% to 3.7% to 0% to 0.03% and now 0.05% in a matter of 1 month and I do not know why. I make changes every week to see if I can get higher on google results. I do well with one website which is for a medical office that has been open for years. This new one where the office has only been open a few months I am having trouble. We aren't getting calls like I am hoping we would. In fact the only one we did receive I believe is because we were closest to him in proximity on google maps. I am also having some trouble with the "Links" aspect of SEO.  Everywhere I see to get linked it seems you have to pay. We are a medical office we aren't selling products so not many Blogs would want to talk about us. Any help that could assist me with getting a higher rank on google would be greatly appreciated. Also any help with getting the search visibility up would be great as well.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benjaminleemd
                1
              • atomiconline

                Best way to "Prune" bad content from large sites?

                I am in process of pruning my sites for low quality/thin content. The issue is that I have multiple sites with 40k + pages and need a more efficient way of finding the low quality content than looking at each page individually. Is there an ideal way to find the pages that are worth no indexing that will speed up the process but not potentially harm any valuable pages? Current plan of action is to pull data from analytics and if the url hasn't brought any traffic in the last 12 months then it is safe to assume it is a page that is not beneficial to the site. My concern is that some of these pages might have links pointing to them and I want to make sure we don't lose that link juice. But, assuming we just no index the pages we should still have the authority pass along...and in theory, the pages that haven't brought any traffic to the site in a year probably don't have much authority to begin with. Recommendations on best way to prune content on sites with hundreds of thousands of pages efficiently?  Also, is there a benefit to no indexing the pages vs deleting them? What is the preferred method, and why?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline
                0
              • justin-brock

                Distilled U or Market Motive? Need recommendations for self-paced, advanced SEO training courses.

                I'd like to get some recommendations on self-paced SEO courses. They need to be online, and they need to be rather advanced. Moz has perks for both Distilled U and Market Motive. Has anyone gone through these? What are the differences in format, content, etc.?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | justin-brock
                0
              • JohnPeters

                "Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?

                I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
                yoast.com › Social Media
                yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
                0
              • alexgray

                Google Said "Repeat the search with the omitted results included."

                We have some pages targeting the different countries but with the Near to Similar content/products, just distinguished with the country name etc. one of the page was assigned to me for optimizing. two or three Similar pages are ranked with in top 50 for the main keyword. I updated some on page content to make it more distinguish from others. After some link building, I found that this page still not showing in Google result, even I found the following message on the google. "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 698 already displayed.
                If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." I clicked to repeat omitted result and found that my targeted url on 450th place in google (before link building this was not) My questions are Is google consider this page low quality or duplicate content? Is there any role of internal linking to give importance a page on other (when they are near to similar)? Like these pages can hurt the whole site rankings? How to handle this issue?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexgray
                0
              • mhans

                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

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans
                1
              • Sayers

                How do you implement dynamic SEO-friendly URLs using Ajax without using hashbangs?

                We're building a new website platform and are using Ajax as the method for allowing users to select from filters. We want to dynamically insert elements into the URL as the filters are selected so that search engines will index multiple combinations of filters. We're struggling to see how this is possible using symfony framework. We've used www.gizmodo.com as an example of how to achieve SEO and user-friendly URLs but this is only an example of achieving this for static content. We would prefer to go down a route that didn't involve hashbangs if possible. Does anyone have any experience using hashbangs and how it affected their site? Any advice on the above would be gratefully received.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers
                1

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter
              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.