Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
-
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
-
It is Bing that says it is incorrect, not me.
"To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website."You are correct in that it does say, "no need for that" and says the use is incorect. So why do it?
-
Actually, there is more to the article. It says there is "no need for that" referring to adding a canonical tag to a page referring to itself. It is a stretch to say such usage is "incorrect".
I did what I could to re-read the article and try as objectively as possible to see your viewpoint but was unsuccessful. I asked two other people to read the article and they also were not able to come to the same conclusion. I think you are very very pro-Microsoft/Bing, which is not a bad thing except it seems you may add extra significance to certain statements made by MS/Bing.
Alan, we can go back and forth but there is no further point. Your position, as well as mine, are well set. Neither of us will successfully convince the other to change opinions on this topic without the introduction of new information. The original person who asked the question has been satisfied and made his or her decision. I'm going to let this topic go.
Best Regards
-
atcualy Rayn, the snpitt you cut from the article
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you.
in full reads
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website.I would not advice using it in all pages
-
No it is Bings claim
If you have posted the quote in full from bing it reads
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website.So to say it is a indutrsty standard, is simple not correct.
I think the argument is between you and bing.
-
So it is your opinion that Google, SEOmoz, Distilled and countless others misuse the tag? We will just have to disagree on this point.
The canonical tag has been out for close to three years. I like Duane Forrester. I link Bing. But Bing is not the dominant player in search. They don't make the rules. The fact last month Bing announced their opinion that it is inappropriate to use the canonical tag on the same page is interesting. It's interesting.
If Duane or Bing explicitly shared they would penalize sites for using the tag on the same page as the referred to canonical link then it would rise above "interesting" to something which we might consider taking action upon. Instead, Bing took the opposite approach and clearly stated "To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you".
-
The industry best standard would be to use it properly, that is use it to point to a canonical page. not to put it in the canonical page. that what it is for. That is what one of the main industry players advises. the other said they can cope with it in the pointed at page, but did not advise it.
Putting it in each page is a misuses, as i underrstadn it it is done to stop screen scaping, that is not the correct use of the tag.
-
Thanks everyone for the great answers.
My website contains over 216,000 pages, most of them being search result pages with canonical urls.
I can't justify adding extra code that points the link juice to the same page it's on so I'll leave the canonical url off the target page.
I'll be monitoring the behaviour and will report back if I notice anything.
-
There are many sites which generate 20+ canonical versions of a page for every primary version. You have the print version along with both ascending and descending for 10 fields such as price, color, size and many other fields. In these cases a 301 should not be used and a canonical tag should be used.
Again, I think you are misinterpreting the article's intent Alan. The exact quote is "it doesn’t help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website." In the above situation, it would not be a misuse. It is exactly what the tag was designed for.
If Bing wants to disregard the canonical tag on pages where it points to the same page, they are clearly wise enough to do so with a single line of code. If they penalize sites for an industry best practice when they are clearly not the dominant player in the field, they wont last. Bing seems to be a good group of people who are making all the right moves to be more competitive with Google. I trust them to intelligently handle this situation in a similar manner to Google.
-
The best we can do in this Q&A is offer our knowledge and feedback and leave it up to others to make their decision. For my clients I will follow the current industry best practice.
I have reviewed the information you shared by Bing and I have to believe even Bing does not penalize sites on any level for use of the canonical tag in the manner described in this thread. Some quotes from the Bing article you mentioned:
"To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. "
When speaking about using rel=canonical to list the same web page the tag appears on the article says "No need for that." but never suggests there is any penalty for doing such. I would further back down to the above quote where they said it "doesn't hurt you" and common sense to say there is no penalty.
Alan, I appreciate your sharing the Bing point of view. It makes us think critically and differently about various scenarios. I asked two others to read the same article you mentioned and no one else interpreted the same way you did. After considering all the information available on the topic I still feel it is a best practice to use the canonical tag on every page of a site.
-
I think the canonical is a last resort, you should fix the problems in other ways. Variation of a url should be fixed with a 301 if possible
bing will ignore you canonicals will lose trust in your site if the are not used correctly, eg: on every page,
-
Agree,
There are many possible variations of same URLS, not under site owner control - different ?parametrs etc. So better add cannonical to each page.
-
Well i would want to optimize it for 100% if posible, adding a canonical to the pointed at page does not optimize if for Bing or Google.
Bing may penalize you for having it in without having that intent, it may be a side effect of somthing else.
If i made a screen scapper, i would remove canonical tags annd absolute links.
The point ios a canoncal cannot pass all link juice or you would get infinte loops, rthere must be some decay, and if as Duane says, it assigns value to itsself, then it would not pass alll that value.
-
I read that article from Bing and knowing it exists I would not change my response nor my practice. The logic is:
-
The quote says "there is no need" for it, but does not indicate it is harmful
-
It would frankly be very dumb for Bing to penalize a site for a practice which is not visible to users, exists solely for search engines and otherwise does no harm. It would be easiest and smartest for them to simply disregard the tag if they felt it was not useful.
-
Ultimately site owners need to decide how to best optimize their site. Do you want to optimize for Google which controls 70% of the market? Or Bing+Yahoo which is maybe 30%?
Adding a canonical tag not only provides a layer of protection against scrapers, it helps against various CMS and human errors where pages are copied accidentally or intentionally.
-
-
Not recommened by bing
The only reson i can see it being useful, to maybe save you if you are screen scraped, but I think anyone that screen scapes woul also look out for canonical tags.
SEOMoz does it, they recommend it in web apps, for the reason i gave , this is why I started doing it. But sicne them bing has recommened not to do it.
i have a suspision that it may even be a link juice leak, as Duane forrested states
"Pointing a rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us
_“this page is a copy of itself. Please pass any value from itself to itself.” _
No need for that."Could that mean it leaks link juice on that hop? Or does it double up on value?
-
I would suggest the most commonly accepted industry best practice is to place a canonical tag on every page.
Google does it. Check http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
SEOmoz does it. Check this Q&A thread.
Distilled does it. Check their home page: http://www.distilled.net/
I would not say it is "necessary" but it can be a helpful.
-
You are correct, they do not need to be on the pointed at page. In fact Bing states they should not be as they can confuse the Bot.
A canonical is like 301 that does not physicly move the user, but passes and link juice to the pouinted at page.
You would not have a 301 on the destination page 301ing to itself.
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
-
I need help on how best to do a complicated site migration. Replacing certain pages with all new content and tools, and keeping the same URL's. The rest just need to disappear safely. Somehow.
I'm completely rebranding a website but keeping the same domain. All content will be replaced and it will use a different theme and mostly new plugins. I've been building the new site as a different site in Dev mode on WPEngine. This means it currently has a made-up domain that needs to replace the current site. I know I need to somehow redirect the content from the old version of the site. But I'm never going to use that content again. (I could transfer it to be a Dev site for the current domain and automatically replace it with the click of a button - just as another option.) What's the best way to replace blahblah.com with a completely new blahblah.com if I'm not using any of the old content? There are only about 4 URL'st, such as blahblah.com/contact hat will remain the same - with all content replaced. There are about 100 URL's that will no longer be in use or have any part of them ever used again. Can this be done safely?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brickbatmove1 -
Canonical's, Social Signals and Multi-Regional website.
Hi all, I have a website that is setup to target different countries by using subfolders. Example /aus/, /us/, /nz/. The homepage itself is just a landing page redirect to whichever country the user belongs to. Example somebody accesses https://domain/ and will be redirected to one of the country specific sub folders. The default subfolder is /us/, so all users will be redirected to it if their country has not been setup on the website. The content is mostly the same on each country site apart from localisation and in some case content specific to that country. I have set up each country sub folder as a separate site in Search Console and targeted /aus/ to AU users and /nz/ to NZ users. I've also left the /us/ version un-targeted to any specific geographical region. In addition to this I've also setup hreflang tags for each page on the site which links to the same content on the other country subfolder. I've target /aus/ and /nz/ to en-au and en-nz respectively and targeted /us/ to en-us and x-default as per various articles around the web. We generally advertise our links without a country code prefix, and the system will automatically redirect the user to the correct country when they hit that url. Example, somebody accesses https://domain/blog/my-post/, a 302 will be issues for https://domain/aus/blog/my-post/ or https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ etc.. The country-less links are advertised on Facebook and in all our marketing campaigns Overall, I feel our website is ranking quite poorly and I'm wondering if poor social signals are a part of it? We have a decent social following on Facebook (65k) and post regular blog posts to our Facebook page that tend to peek quite a bit of interest. I would have expected that this would contribute to our ranking at least somewhat? I am wondering whether the country-less link we advertise on Facebook would be causing Googlebot to ignore it as a social signal for the country specific pages on our website. Example Googlebot indexes https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ and looks for social signals for https://domain/us/blog/my-post/ specifically, however, it doesn't pick up anything because the campaign url we use is https://domain/blog/my-post/. If that is the case, I am wondering how I would fix that, to receive the appropriate social signals /us/blog/my-post/, /aus/blog/my-post/ & /nz/blog/my-post/. I am wondering if changing the canonical url to the country-less url of each page would improve my social signals and performance in the search engines overall. I would be interested to hear your feedback. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | destinyrescue0 -
What are Soft 404's and are they a problem
Hi, I have some old pages that were coming up in google WMT as a 404. These had links into them so i thought i'd do a 301 back to either the home page or to a relevant category or page. However these are now listed in WMT as soft 404's. I'm not sure what this means and whether google is saying it doesn't like this? Any advice welcomed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Aikijeff0 -
Tool that can retrieve mysite URL's
Hi, Tool that can retrieve mysite URL's I am not talking about href,open explorer, Majestic etc I have a list of 1000 site URL's where my site name is mentioned. I want to get the exact URL of my site next to the URL i want to query with Example http://moz.com/community is the URL i have and if this page has mysite name then i need to get the complete URL captured. Any software or tool that can do this? I used one for sure which got me this info but now i don't remember it Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
What do do when sidebar is causing "Too Many On-Page Links" error
I have been going through all the errors, warnings from my weekly SEO Moz scans. One thing I'm see a bit of is "Too Many On-Page Links". I've only seen a few, but as in the case of this one: http://blog.mexpro.com/5-kid-friendly-cancun-mexico-resorts there is only 2 links on the page (the image and the read more). So I think the sidebar links are causing the error. I feel my tags are important to help readers find information they may be looking for. Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud? Should I exclude the tags, with the risk of making things more difficult for my users? Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Refocusing a site's conent
Here's a question I was asked recently, and I can really see going either way, but want to double check my preference. The site has been around for years and over that time expanded it's content to a variety of areas that are not really core to it's mission, income or themed content. These jettisonable other areas have a fair amount of built up authority but don't really contribute anything to the site's bottom line. The site is considering what to do with these off-theme pages and the two options seem to be: Leave them in place, but make them hard to find for users, thus preserving their authority as an inlink to other core pages. or... Just move on and 301 the pages to whatever is half-way relevant. The 301 the pages camp seems to believe that making the site's existing/remaining content focused on three or four narrower areas will have benefits for what Google sees the site as being about. So, instead of being about 12 different things that aren't too related to each other, the site will be about 3 or 4 things that are kinda related to eachother. Personally, I'm not eager to let go of old pages because they do produce some traffic and have some authority value to help the core pages via in-context and navigation links. On the other hand, maybe focusing more would have benefits search benefits. What do think? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How would you handle 12,000 "tag" pages on Wordpress site?
We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak1 -
Pagination: rel="next" rel="prev" in ?
With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request. I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful. When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the . Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head? (Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss1