Rel="canonical" on home page?

[SamCUK]

I'm using wordpress and the all in one seo pack with the canonical option checked. As I understand it the rel="canonical" tag should be added to pages that are duplicate or similar to tell google that another page (one without the rel="canonical" tag) is the correct one as the url in the tag is pointing google towards it.

Why then does the all in one seo pack add rel="canonical" to every page on my site including the home page? Isn't that confusing for google?

[Dr-Pete]

There are mixed opinions on using it on every page, but I think it's very useful on the home-page, for exactly the reasons that @donford suggests. It's easy for the home-page to get a bunch of variants indexed, including tracking parameters.

Originally, Google said that canonical wasn't proactive, but they've eased up on that. Worst case, they may just ignore it, but the All-In-One SEO approach on a blog isn't a bad bet. It's just so easy for dynamic sites to spin off duplicate URLs that it's better to be proactive.

I've never seen a penalty or devaluation due to using canonical when it's not necessary. I think Bing implied that they may ignore it if they see it too often, but I've never even seen a concrete example of that happening. It's so commonplace now that you'd hear about it if sites were being penalized.

[donford]

It would also make sense if you're home page generates something like

www. A Site.com
www. A Site.com/
www. A Site.com/index.php
www. A Site.com/index.php/

This prevents duplicate page content issues as those pages while the exact same, are different URL's. The canonical tag should point to a single page whichever one is the real url for your site.

Hope that helps,

Don

[JarnoNijzing]

it is confusing indeed.. had the same problem but read a lot about in on internet and Woj Kwasi is absolutely right.

It tells google, hey look, this is the original page with this original content.

also: use it in combination with htaccess files and you should be able to fix every problem

[wojkwasi]

It's just saying to Google that the page it's on is the originator of the content