Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
-
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable? -
@Adnan-farooq said in Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document:
i don't think that we used canonical tag for PDF document i think no option is visible on moz
Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.
-
Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.
-
-
There's two answers to this.
One is that whilst it's best practice for all URLs to have a canonical (even if it's self-referencing), if this resource has no duplicates, it's not mandatory.
The other is that yes, you can add a canonical tag to a web page. You'd have to do it at the HTTP header level.
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
-
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
Paid Search Marketing | | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” . Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check. Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
Duplicate content: using the robots meta tag in conjunction with the canonical tag?
We have a WordPress instance on an Apache subdomain (let's say it's blog.website.com) alongside our main website, which is built in Angular. The tech team is using Akamai to do URL rewrites so that the blog posts appear under the main domain (website.com/more-keywords/here). However, due to the way they configured the WordPress install, they can't do a wildcard redirect under htaccess to force all the subdomain URLs to appear as subdirectories, so as you might have guessed, we're dealing with duplicate content issues. They could in theory do manual 301s for each blog post, but that's laborious and a real hassle given our IT structure (we're a financial services firm, so lots of bureaucracy and regulation). In addition, due to internal limitations (they seem mostly political in nature), a robots.txt file is out of the question. I'm thinking the next best alternative is the combined use of the robots meta tag (no index, follow) alongside the canonical tag to try to point the bot to the subdirectory URLs. I don't think this would be unethical use of either feature, but I'm trying to figure out if the two would conflict in some way? Or maybe there's a better approach with which we're unfamiliar or that we haven't considered?
Technical SEO | | prasadpathapati0 -
Canonical Tags - Do they only apply to internal duplicate content?
Hi Moz, I've had a complaint from a company who we use a feed from to populate a restaurants product list.They are upset that on our products pages we have canonical tags linking back to ourselves. These are in place as we have international versions of the site. They believe because they are the original source of content we need to canonical back to them. Can I please confirm that canonical tags are purely an internal duplicate content strategy. Canonical isn't telling google that from all the content on the web that this is the original source. It's just saying that from the content on our domains, this is the original one that should be ranked. Is that correct? Furthermore, if we implemented a canonical tag linking to Best Restaurants it would de-index all of our restaurants listings and pages and pass the authority of these pages to their site. Is this correct? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | benj20341 -
PDF in search results?
Hello community! I am not an SEO professional, though I am a practitioner, I would say. I am seeking a solution on behalf of a friend. If you search the term "Peter Blatt" you will discover a "black eye" on the first page, towards the bottom of SERPs. It's a PDF published on the Florida Department of Financial Services website regarding the final order for a settlement he and his company ("Blatt Financial Group") reached with the state as it related to professional conduct allegations. Does anyone have any advice on how to address this? I don't want "game" the search engines, but at the same time, this document looks really scary and much worse than it actually is to people, and I would love for it do drop below page one. Any advice or suggestions from the community? Thanks! Tom
Technical SEO | | 800GoldLaw0 -
Unfamiliar Meta Description Tags
I'm working with a client who uses a CMS which loads meta tags into their site through its backend. On-page I see this in the source:
Technical SEO | | medtouch0 -
Schema tags - Schema.org
We have rolled out Schema tags for our homepage which has been very beneficial for us. We obviously don't want to go overboard however; can you please clarify, should Schema tags be limited to the homepage location, or implemented through the site? Thanks
Technical SEO | | hickboy50