Rel=canonical
-
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.
-
Thank you. i have set it to all pages but i will have a look for any duplicates by using Xenu program.
-
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!
-
Thanks,
Okay so you recommend add rel canonical only for homepage right?
-
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."
-
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.
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
-
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Canonical URL's searchable in Google?
Hi - we have a newly built site using Drupal, and Drupal likes to create canonical tags on pretty much everything, from their /node/ url's to the URL Alias we've indicated. Now, when I pull a moz crawl report, I get a huge list of all the /node/ plus other URL's. That's beside the point though... Question: when I directly enter one of the /node/ url's into a google search, a result is found. Clicking on it redirects to the new URL, but should Google even be finding these non-canonical URL's?? I don't feel like I've seen this before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Previously owned domain & canonical
Hi, I've recently joined the business and as part of the cleanup process I got told that we owned this domain preferredsafaris.com with some very similar content to our main site southernafricatravel.com. We're no longer owns the preferredsafaris.com domain but looking at Google's cache for it we realised that the title, meta description & page shown when looking at the 'cached page' is for our current domain even though it is showing the 'correct' URL there. I imagine this might have something to do with canonical set on those pages but the weird thing is all those pages now render 404 & do not show a canonical in the source code. I have used Google Removal Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals for all those URLs & Google says that it has removed them & yet they're still showing. What do you suggest? Any potential issue in regards to duplicate content here? Cheers, Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs
Hello all. I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's. Using Magento Platform. site.com/category1/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
site.com/category2/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/ ( this is where other categories link to ) Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 which takes care of duplicate content correctly. I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ ) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Canonical Tags being indexed on paginated results?
On a website I'm working on which has a search feature with paginated results, all of the pages of the search results are set with a canonical tag back to the first page of the search results, however Google is indexing certain random pages within the result set. I can literally do a search in Google and find a deep page in the results, click on it and view source on that page and see that it has a canonical tag leading back to the first page of the set. Has anyone experienced this before? Why would Google not honor a canonical tag if it is set correctly? I've seen several SEO techniques for dealing with pagination, is there another solution that you all recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
Should I put rel=publisher on UGC?
My website has a main section that we call expert content and write for. We also have a community subdomain which is all user generated. We are a pretty big brand and I am wondering should the rel publisher tag just be for the www expert content, or should we also use it on the community UGC even though we don't directly write that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarloSchneider1 -
Rel canonical issues on wordpress posts
Our site has 500 rel canonical issues. This is the way i understand the issues. All our blog posts automatically include a rel=canonical to themselves.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acs111
eg a blog about content marketing has: Should this tag point to one of the main pages instead so the link juice is sent back to our home page?0 -
Rel Canonical = WHAT
can someone please explain this "NOTICE" i am getting from my campaign...Is this a problem that needs attention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEObleu.com0