Can I canonical the same page?
-
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page.
Example:
http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65
I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages -
When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
-
The term "canonical" comes from maths. It means "the standard form to present something in". So, if you have two or more things that are very similar or identical then you might want to say "this is the canonical version - the standard thing we will refer to".
For example, if your CMS is a bit old-school and creates two versions of a page - one human-friendly like example.com/blog-post and another horrible one like example.com?id=12397863294862395 - then you want to point search engines to the nice one and say "this is the standard, canonical version - refer to that one". So in this case you should definitely use on example.com?id=1239786329486239 to give search engines that instruction. If you also add this to example.com/blog-post then that's fine - all you are saying is "this is the standard version of this page" which is perfectly valid.
But from your question, this doesn't sound like your plan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your plan sounds like you will tell the search engines something along the lines of "you see that blog post there, and that one there, and that one there, and that one over there? They're actually all the same thing, and the standard, canonical page you should refer to is this category page". That wouldn't be a good idea, because all of those articles are different things.
So, I wouldn't add a hard-coded canonical URL into your template. Instead - as long as your CMS allows it - add the canonical tag to the of each article and link to the search engine friendly version of each blog post.
-
Josh -
The rel=canonical tag should be used for pages that have virtually identical content.
For example, if your page is:
http://www.domain.com/articles.html... but the page also loads with:
httt://domain.com/articles.htmlThen you'd want to put a rel="canonical" link in the section of the HTML page:
Here's Google's page on the rel canonical tag:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=enWhat it sounds like you have going are multiple pages (Pagination) that list articles, and you should use the rel=prev/next to not have duplicate page content issues.
The recommendation from Moz:
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
... is to:
Either rel=canonical to a "View All" page (if having all results on one page is viable) or that you use rel=prev/next tag, as described here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.htmlHope this helps!
- Jeff
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
-
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions. My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog. Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content? Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created? While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it? Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please. Thanks, Iain.
Technical SEO | | iainmoran0 -
Categories and rel canonical
Hello everyone, I have a doubt in how to approach this problem. I have a local business website, and i want to rank this website for our main KW. So the idea is to rank the main Keyword to the home page www.sitename.com At the same time we blog every week and one of the categories is the same has the main Keyword. It makes sense because the majority of the blog posts are about it. In a certain way the homepage and the category page are competing for the same keyword. How can i approach this problem? Should i use rel canonical in the category page, pointing to the homepage? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | Barbio0 -
Product category paging
Hi, My product categories have 2-3 pages each. I have paging implemented with rel=next and rel=prev. from some reason Google GWT now reports the pages as having duplicate titles and description. Should I be worried? Should I set a different title like "blue category - page x" ? Thanx, Asaf
Technical SEO | | AsafY0 -
Page title vs page element
Hello! I'm new to SEO as my question would imply. Can someone show me the difference between a page title and a page element? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | atrenary1 -
What are the causes of pages desindexation?
Hello, I was wondering what can be the causes of pages desindexation by Google? A poor quality pages,...? Thank you for your answers, Jonathan
Technical SEO | | JonathanLeplang0