Canonical Tag Pointing To The Same URL
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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