Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
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I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
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You need to fix it quickly. Yes, canonical is a suggestion, but in my experience it's a very strong suggestion. I ran an experiment a while back where setting rel=canonical sitewide wreaked havoc on one of my sites:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
Now, Google may recognize it's a mistake and ignore it, but they also may just take days or weeks to process it, and the damage is just going to increase. I'd fix it ASAP and try to get appropriate (self-referencing) canonical tags in place.
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Canonicals are in fact a preference indicator (suggestion). Rel=canonical is only one of the indicators to calculate the most relevant content to display. Google will probably ignore it in your situation because all the canonicals point to the same page. I agree with Irivng Weiss, fix it ASAP anyway.
Take a look at this video from Matt Cutts (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394). He explains everything very well regarding it's uses and best practices.
Darin.
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the canonical is a recommendation not a directive that they have to follow so they are probably smart enough to see that this is a mistake. I would fix it ASAP though.
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