Using Canonical Tags on Every Page
-
I'm doing competitive research and noticed that one of our competitors (who outranks us) uses canonical tags on every page on their site. The canonical tags reference the page they are on. For example. www.competitor.com/product has a canonical tag of www.competitor.com/product. Does anyone use this practice? It seems strange to me.
Thank you,
Kristen
-
Thanks for your response. Screaming Frog is the tool I using when I came across this (I love this tool!). I bet these are just automatically generated by their CMS. That makes the most sense as to why someone would do this in this specific example. They don't have many webpages overall.
-
If it's always identical, it doesn't seem to bring a lot of added value.
Sometimes, it's just added by default in the CMS, just in case (sometimes CMS's can generate pages you don't expect to exist). Plenty of sites are doing it (Moz as well).
The best way to know if you would need to add canonical is to check your site with a crawl tool (like Screaming Frog or Xenu's Link Sleuth). If you don't find any duplicate url's, you won't need it. You could also crawl the site of your competitor, and check if the url is always identical to the canonical (Screaming frog has this functionality). Also check your landing pages in Analytics & Webmaster tools to see if you see any abnormal url's.
Having canonical urls (apart for the duplicate content part) has no specific other advantages for SEO (but it doesn't hurt either). If your competitor is outranking you, it's probably not because of the canonical, but for other reasons.
Last, some people add canonicals to avoid scraping - they hope that the scraper will also include the canonical. Personally, I doubt that this is very useful. Somebody who scrapes content will probably also get rid of the canonical & replace it with his own url.
-
If they are doing a lot of campaigns where they would have many urls with various query strings pointing to the pages then it would make sense to just have each page generated with the tag on it.
-
Right - I understand the way that you are supposed to use canonical tags. However, they are using it on every page and it is identical url of the page they are using it on. It doesn't seem right.
-
Hi,
it's not really necessary to do it, but can be useful to make sure that the right url is being indexed and to avoid duplicate content issues.. Example - using canonical avoids that pages like site.com/index.htm&trackingid=xyz are indexed - only the correct site.com/index.htm will be indexed. Another example could be articles which could published in two sections, but only may be indexed in one section. Be carefuI, I sometimes see examples where the canonical is always identical to the url - even for the examples as given before, which basically renders the canonical useles.
If you are sure that each page of your site has one unique url than you don't need the canonical url.
rgds
Dirk
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
-
Joomla Home Page Title Tag Issue
I have got a site that requires to have a custom title tag for its home page (primarily). Its using Joomla 3.3.1. I am not using any SEO components as of now. I have checked the the global configuration, It has Polymer Resources as the site name. I am also attaching copy of the Menu Manager>Main menu> home I would like to see the Home Page browser Title to read: Custom Engineered Plastic Resin | Polymer Resources But my current settings does not let me change the home page title. Any help in this regard will be highly appreciated. Thank you in advance 7yfHVw0.png KzouLB7.png
On-Page Optimization | | ArthurRadtke0 -
Does having landing page text beneath the products at the base of the page hinder SEO?
I have a site that is capable of hosting the landing page description either above the products under the H1 or below them at the bottom of the page before the footer. I have always chosen to keep the text "above the fold" as presumably this would be crawled sooner in relation to the rest of the page content than had it been at the bottom. However, this means that I can only really write just a few sentences for each landing page - otherwise the products would shift further down the page - and I don't think this is good from a UX POV. Question: If I move the bulk of my landing page descriptions to the text snippet located underneath the products, could this negatively affect my SEO? Text at the bottom of the page is obviously not significant for users, so is there a chance this could be seen as spam?
On-Page Optimization | | Silkstream0 -
I'm using Canonical URL but still receiving message - Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Hello, I checked my site and it looks like everything is setup correctly for canonical url but I keep getting the message that it's not. Am I doing something wrong? SORRY I FIGURED IT OUT! THANK YOU! HOW DO I DELETE THIS?
On-Page Optimization | | seohlp440 -
Which permalink structure should i use
Hi Im using wordpress for a trading market update site so most of the posts i add are time relevant... What permalink structure is best to use? Just /postname/ or /year/month/postname/ Thanks in advance! Chris
On-Page Optimization | | chrisleonard0 -
Canonical Notice
I am curious why I receive this canonical notice even though there is a canonical for this homepage. Nq3fD.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | paumer800 -
Page Title
My website was hacked last November and then again last week. Prior to the hacking we were at number one in Google.co.uk for our main search term "nile cruises' for years. After last November's hacking we dropped to about position 4 and after last week we are at position 7. Ima rebuilding the lost data and I am having to create new Title and Description meta data for each of the indexed pages. I am taking the opportunity to try and ensure my titles and descriptions are good and the correct length, etc but wondered about the best title format. I set our home page title over the weekend as: Nile Cruise | Leading ABTA & ATOL Bonded UK Nile Cruise Specialist I was going to try and cover 3 keyphrases in the title like this: Nile Cruise | Nile Cruises | Nile Cruise Bargains But I thought that might look a bit spammy because the 3 phrases are very similar. I wondered what anyone else might suggest? Thanks, Colin
On-Page Optimization | | NileCruises0 -
Product page optimalisation
Throughout the years our website kept on growing this has led to product pages that have so much sub-pages that nobody is able to really get a good idea of the product. We are working on a new website where the visitor is central. Together with a usability partner we have down sized the preferred data to fit on one page with a tabular system with a maximum of 4 taps. My question will this affect our find ability if we go from 10 to 15 sub-pages to one main page
On-Page Optimization | | TiasNimbas0 -
Why some pages are not indexed?
I have a furniture´s ecommerce. When searching for "site: movstore.com.br" returned 1080 results, but if I search for "site: movstore.com.br / Product" returned 1020 results. I mean, that 1080 indexed pages, 1020 are products pages and the other 60 pages are irrelevant. Where are the category pages? "site: movstore.com.br / Categories" - 0 results
On-Page Optimization | | maisempresas
"site: movstore.com.br / Departments" - 0 results
"site: movstore.com.br / Marks" - 0 results What might be happening?0