Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
-
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
-
In my opinion, you want the juice for each article to stay with each article. I wouldn't redirect all your article juice back to the main /blog page. For me, each unique page (and article) gets its own canonical link and one line = one set of information. Article about oranges, article about apples, both canonical links. You should only get juice from same or similar pages, such as
But not
-
hey matt, thanks for the response. let me ask you this. i have a blog page with a bunch of snippets, that when clicked, lead to the full articles, (each have their own custom page/url). if i want all the juice to go to the main blog page i don't want to have canonical tags on each individual post page, right?
-
Agreed. You page can sometimes end up with query parameters as well when people link to your site, and having the canonical in place will help you avoid having duplicate content.
-
It shouldn't hurt you if it doesn't need it but assuming you have www and non-www, wouldn't that part of the canonical always help anyways? By default, you would have
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded
http://yoursite.com/notagneeded
and if you're on most common CMSs,
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded/index.php or index.html or index.asp
It would actually be pretty rare to have a page with absolutely no use for rel=canonical but I don't see why it would hurt at all.
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
-
Do we need both an .XML Sitemap and a .aspx sitemap?
Hi Mozers, We recently switched servers and it came to my attention that we have two sitemaps a XML version of the sitemap and a .aspx version of the sitemap. This came to light as the .aspx version of the sitemap is causing the site to come to a screeching halt as it has some complex code and lists over 80,000 products. My question is do we need both versions of the sitemap? My understanding is that the XML version is for Search Engine bots and the .aspx version is for customers. I can't imagine that anyone is using our .aspx version as it is basically a page with 80,000 links and it's buried away on the site, so we were hoping to kill off the .aspx version of the sitemap and keep the .xml version for Search Engine Bots. I wanted to check here first to make sure we did not any negative search engine implications. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks so much! Patrick
Web Design | | gatorpool0 -
2 Menu links to same page. Is this a problem?
One of my clients wants to link to the same page from several places in the navigation menu. Does this create any crawl issues or indexing problems? It's the same page (same url) so there is no duplicate content problems. Since the page is promotional, the client wants the page accessible from different places in the nav bar. Thanks, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Should i not use hyphens in web page titles? Google Penalty for hyphens?
all the page titles in my site have hyphens between the words like this: http://texas.com/texas-plumbers.html I have seen tests where hyphenated domain names ranked lower than non hyphenated domain names. Does this mean my pages are being penalized for hyphens or is this only in the domain that it is penalized? If I create new pages should I not use hyphens in the page titles when there are two or more words in the title? If I changed all my page titles to eliminate the hyphens, I would lose all my rankings correct? My site is 12 years old and if I changed all these titles I'm guessing that each page would be thrown in the google sandbox for several months, is this true? Thanks mozzers!
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Question on Breadcrumb and Canonical
Hi SEOmozers, I have another question. =] Thanks in advance. First question: How important is the breadcrumb for SEO? I know that breadcrumb makes better UX because it shows how the visitor landed on this page and the breadcrumb may show up in the search engine. But other than that, how important is it? Second Question: If I have a page that can be found via 2 locations, how should I handle this in regards to breadcrumb? For example, I have page A. You can access page A via Category A and Category B. Therefore, what I did was list Page A under Category A and when someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it will redirect to the page A that was found via Category A. The problem is on page A, the breadcrumb is Home > Category A > Page A. So if someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it redirects and the breadcrumb shows Home > Category A > Page A. What should I do with the breadcrumb for Category B > Page A? Should I create another page A and just use canonical on it? Should I create another page A but do not index it? or leave it as is? 1 Page A, can be access via 2 categories. Please advise. Thank you!
Web Design | | TommyTan0 -
Need to rebuild client's flash website
I am working with their web designer and need to figure out a way to rebuild their site which is currently all in flash. I was wondering if there was a way to do this without spending a ton of time in completely re-doing the site from scratch.
Web Design | | awalker840 -
Flat vs. Silo Site Architecture, What's Better
I'm in the midst of converting a fairly large website (500+ pages) into WordPress as a content management system. I know that there are two schools of thought regarding site architecture: Those who believe that everything should be categorized, I.E.- website.com/shoes/reebok/running People who believe that the less clicks it takes from the homepage the better. As it stands, our current site has a completely flat architecture, with landing pages being added randomly to the root, I.E.- website.com/affordable-shoes-in-louisville-ky I'm beginning to think that there is a gray area with this. I spoke to someone who says that you should never have a page more than 2 categories/subfolders deep. But if we plan on adding a lot of content doesn't it make sense to set the site up into many categories so we can set a good foundation for adding massive amounts of content. Also, will 301 redirecting to the new structure cause us to lose rankings for certain terms? Any help here is appreciated.
Web Design | | C-Style0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0
