Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

2 Canonical questions

On-Page Optimization

469

Marketing_Today last edited by

QUESTION 1
I'm working on a site where a canonical link is implemented as

That's not the normal format that I am used to, as I would have written it as

Is that a problem?

QUESTION 2
Why do so many sites these days have a sitewide canonical tag which refers to itself as the canonical?
For example: http://www.site.co.uk/page has a canonical of
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
MickEdwards last edited by

Attributes and their corresponding values can be in any order within a tag.

Having a self referring canonical tag also helps eliminate duplication issues if the site produces query strings appended to the URL. There is no ambiguity as to which is the "real" URL.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 2
The_Sage last edited by

Q1: Both of those pieces of code mean the same thing. You can use the "attributes" (href, rel) interchangeably.

Q2: It stops page scrapers.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 2

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

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Will adding canonical affect traffic to the non canonical page?

We have three URLs that have the same content but all three are getting traffic.
On-Page Optimization | | NanditaKraman

1
The correct way to rel=canonical

When adding the rel=canonical tag to a landing page inside a folder, should the tag read: or With or without the index.php? TY KJr
On-Page Optimization | | KevnJr

1
Simple question: I wonder if I'm over internally linking?

Hi, What's you guys' policy on how much to internally link. I do it a lot - whenever it makes sense, but hold off if I just linked to the same page in the last paragraph, for instance. Would like to know your thoughts to see if I'm overdoing it. This is for Ecommerce blog posts, category descriptions, and product descriptions if that matters. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW

0
Understanding why our new page doesn't rank. Internal link structure to blame? + understand canonical pages more.

Hi guys. Sorry it's an essay...BUT, i think a lot of you will find this an interesting question. This question is in 2 (related) parts, and I imagine it would be an 'advanced' SEO question. Hoping you guys can help bring some real insight 🙂 Always amazed at the quality for this forum/ community. **Context... ** We had a duplicate content issue caused by this page and it's product permutations, so we placed canonical tags on all the product permutations to solve it. Worked a treat. However, we now have more **product ranges. **We now sell Diaries, Notebooks & Music books, which are clearly different from one another. So...we've placed canonical tags on all the product permutations leading back to the 'parent' theme. In other words, all the diary permutations 'lead back' to the diary page. All the notebooks permutations 'lead back' to the main notebook page. So on and so forth. Make sense so far? Context end..... Issue. Amazingly our Diary page outranks our notebook pagefor the search term 'Design your own Notebook'. The notebook page is well optimised for this search term, and the diary page avoids the word 'notebook' altogether (so no keyword cannibalisation going on). Possible reason? Our Diary page has a vast amount of internal links to it throughout our site. The notebook page has only a few. Could this be the issue? If so, what reading/ blogs/ content/ tools would you recommend to help understand and solve this problem? i.e) Better understanding internal link structure for SEO. 2nd part of the question (in the context of internal linking for SEO). When there are internal links to a page with a conical tag does that 'count' towards the 'parent page', or simply towards that specific page? I really hope that makes sense. If it's clear as mud just shout. Isaac. EDIT: All pages in question have been indexed since we added these changes to the site.
On-Page Optimization | | isaac663

0
Product Colour Variation and Canonicals

Hi there, We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations. An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course). My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link? Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | yousayjump

0
Question about the variations of keyphrases on different pages

Hi, I am a big fan of seomoz and read a lot of articles! I have a new site for services in London. I have 5 main keyphrases on 5 different pages. Would it be better to make new pages with variations of those 5 keyphrases? As an example: one of the main keyphrases is "Service London" and I want to create new pages -- "Services West Ruislip", "Services Poplar", "Services Brixton" and etc. Should it be better to do it as described or to keep the 5 main keywords and focus on them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | yanko84

0
Crawl Diagnostics - Duplicates and canonical problem

SEOmoz crowl diagnostic reports duplicates (title, content) issue on this addres: http://www.meblobranie.pl/biurowe/fotele-biurowe/promocje page already has canonical tag - is this a bug of crowler, or smth wrong on page?
On-Page Optimization | | SITS

0
Dupelicate content home page and custom page question

I am working on a website that got hit by the penguin update. Didn't get hit terribly bad, but dropped from number one to number 9. As I'm going through the pages, the theme and content is a mess. To give an example, say the site is about custom colored marbles. The main page content covers custom colored marbles, custom promotional marbles, custom glass marbles, etc. Custom colored marbles is mentioned and covered on all pages, which I am going back and trying to make each page theme specific. There is also a custom page, so I am at a cross roads on how best to employ the focus of the custom page and the home page. I am thinking the home page should emphasize colored marbles, and the custom page should emphasize custom colored marbles. My fear is that making such a drastic change will bounce the site completely off front page and that it will take time for the custom page to come up in rankings. AS it stands now I am confused as to how it even ranks on first page as there's two pages with custom colored marbles emphasis. Id like to clean this up as much as possible so there are no big hits with future google updates, but I don't want the site to drop off either as that would be hard to explain to the owner. Yeah, we are cleaning up your site and making it google compliant and in so doing you no longer rank on first page. That won't put food on the table. Thanks for any advise on this.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm

0