Canonical Tag Pointing To The Same URL
-
Does it matter if a canonical tag points to the URL in which the tag is on?
Example Page: http://www.domain.com
Canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" />
I only ask because a client of mine has a CMS that automatically does that to every page on the site and there's no way to remove it. Will this have a negative impact or does it not matter at all? Any insights would be great because I can't find a clear answer anywhere online.
Thanks!
-
This is actually a best practice IMO. If that page for whatever reason is duplicated somewhere else (could happen a year down the line) then you automatically eliminate the issue of dupe content and are already providing a directive to Google on which page is the original and which page to count.
-
Matt Cutts posted a video regarding this question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8eQgx-njk4. The answer is that it's ok to do.
-
In most situations, you will want the canonical tag pointing to the page that it exists on. The canonical tag tells search engines which page to index, if there are multiple URLs for the same content.
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
-
Optimization expert suggesting we add Canonical tag to every page on site
Hi guys, We're currently launching a new page, and we have an optimization and technical SEO expert (highly rated on Upwork, very intelligent, has solved complicated issues in the past and improved our Core Web Vitals greatly) suggesting we put canonical tags on every page of site, pointing to itself (other than the case of where canonicals should point to other page, we have those listed separately. Do you guys see a benefit to this? Could it harm us? He says large retailers do this, couldn't quite glean the benefit from it though. Current site ranks well and isn't set up like this. Any insight would be much appreciated! Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CitimarineMoz0 -
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
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 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1 -
Do I have a canonical problem?
Does this site www.davidclick.com have a canonical problem because the home page can be requested via 3 different urls http://www.davidclick.com/
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://davidclick.com/
http://www.davidclick.com/index.htm but I'm confused in terms of applying a fix for example all advice here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#1 says i need to identify the duplicate files and add So my question is please if I do have a canonical problem how can i fix it when I only have one file for my home page, there are no duplicates 😞 Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Canonical URL Issue
Hi Everyone, I'm fairly new here and I've been browsing around for a good answer for an issue that is driving me nuts here. I tried to put the canonical url for my website and on the first 5 or 6 pages I added the following script SEOMoz reported that there was a problem with it. I spoke to another friend and he said that it looks like it's right and there is nothing wrong but still I get the same error. For the URL http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html I used the following: <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.cacaniqueis.com.br/video-caca-niqueis.html" /> Is there anything wrong with it? Many thanks in advance for the attention to my question.. 🙂 Alex
Technical SEO | | influxmedia0 -
Does Bing support cross-domain canonical tags?
We have heard Bing takes canonical tags as hints, but do they support cross-domain canonical tags? I don't think this has ever been discussed? Does anyone have an answer or insight? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0