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
-
Is my canonicalisation harmful?
Hi, My site appears to be under a Google penalty. We've had an SEO guy assess the site for us and the working hypothesis is that we are under a Panda penalty for duplicate content. The site is 4 years old and we have never had any success in ranking well for just any none branded keywords. The vacation rental market is highly competitive and we have found ranking for relevant keywords extremely difficult. For just about every keyword that i am tracking we are below 50. We sell vacation rentals. We have ~1500 rental listing pages. Much of the descriptive text content for those pages has been taken from other vacation rental sites. I should add that this same content is used by many vacation rental websites also; we're all trying to sell the same listings. We have started rewriting the the text content for the listings but as there are 1500 of them it is a slow process. We have listings in 26 different countries. Each country has it's own landing page. As an experiment our SEO guy recommended that we canonicalise each listing that belongs to a specific region towards it's regional landing page to see if we receive more direct traffic and begin to rank more highly for keywords. So www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-1, www.mydomain.com/villa-in-barbados-2, etc all point to www.mydomain.com/barbados as the canonical version of the content. We haven't really seen much improvement in organic traffic and, although we are ranking for more branded keywords we are not seeing much elevation ranking for other keywords. Is this the right way to go about it? The content in the landing pages is significantly different from those pages that have been canonicalised towards them. Cheers
Web Design | | McCaldin0 -
Does anyone have data on the effect of multiple H1 tags on a page?
One of my website's sub-domains is fed information from a job board master-template, thus my site (and hundreds of other sites) is just branded styling pulling from one external source. Because of the way this master template is set up (not very concerned with SEO best practices), I have found the need to hide the H1 coming from the master template, and display a new separate H1 in my styling. This is being done with user-experience in mind, but how will search engines respond to having two H1s (one hidden, one visible) on a page? I understand that a single H1 is usually ideal, and hidden page components are typically frowned upon because they don't add user value... but in this case, the hidden component is solely for the benefit of the user. I would like to find the best balance of SEO and UX, so I am very interested in any experimental data or case studies on a similar situation.
Web Design | | pbailey0 -
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 -
Post vs Pages
Does Google make any distinction between a web page and a blog post? Assuming all else is equal...any reason why a page would rank higher than a post? And that includes a page in WordPress vs a WordPress blog post.
Web Design | | Pinlaser1 -
What else should you call the Home page?
In the menu bar and footer the main page is called Home. Would it confuse people to rename it to Business Name Home or Business Name? How do you handle this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Header tags - big H1s after small H2s
Just spotted bigger H1s and small H2s on a website, in the newsroom. The smaller H2 = section heading (Newsroom), the larger H1 is a news headline. Might that cause me any search engine problems?
Web Design | | McTaggart0 -
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages?
Are there any studies, statistics or measurable impact of using mixed fonts on landing pages? One of our landing pages is using five variations of the Arial font where size, strength (bold, italics) and color all vary. One camp internally believes that this okay, whereas another camp wants to standardize the presentation where there's less variance (such as a heading as one and the body copy as another). Have you been through a similar trial or test in the past? I've seen some instances of a Marketing Sherpa study on the topic, but no real numbers to support one thing or another. I've attached an example image of our current LP. I have a lot of strong opinions on a number of items - but we're looking to have an immediate internal discussion on the font issue first. Thanks! GIzA8.jpg
Web Design | | eMagineSEO0 -
Best Home Page design examples - from a SEO perspective. Could You give me a few?
I am int he process of redesigning a home page and wanted to know from our community if anyone had examples on some great Homepage Designs from an SEO perspective. Things I am looking for : 1. Homepage URL/Design 2. Navitagion 3. Call to action Thank you, much appreciated. The home page I am redesigning is www.gunshotdigital.com Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0