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
-
Okay to have additional attributes in canonical tag?
Hello! I'm helping a Client with a platform migration from an SEO standpoint. They are working to implement canonical tags, but I've noticed that each of the ones they are implementing are including a "data-rdm" attribute: data-rdm=""> I'm not sure the Client has a way to suppress this before the launch date. Do we think this will be an issue for Google?
Web Design | | PattyAMG1 -
Website Form Doesn't Work for Visitors from Google Search App
I've got a strange issue where if visitor is viewing a website from within the Google Search App, the app doesn't seem to be able to handle online forms. The form relies users on entering data, which is then POSTed to an external booking engine site. Normally this works fine, except when Google Search App is acting as the browser, the post payload is empty and the URL breaks. We're a bit stumped as to how to move forward. So far the only lead is that Android users can override having the app behave as a browser - but doesn't seem like iOS users can. Any additional ideas/tips are welcome here - thanks. 🙂
Web Design | | mirabile0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
What happens if I 301 Redirect my homepage to a different page on site
If i were to 301 redirect the index page of my website to a page in a different subdirectory of my site would that adversely affect SEO? Does your home page need to be in the root of your site? I'm asking because a developer has told me that it would be best to do that since he needs to install OpenCart on the root of our domain...
Web Design | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
Our "home page" is behind a member wall, options?
So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in. This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page. It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago. We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it. I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good: 1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list). 2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it. 3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that. Any other thoughts? Thanks! Kenn Gold Publishers Clearing House
Web Design | | Kenn_Gold0 -
How to Add canonical tags on .ASPX pages?
What is the proper way (or is it possible) to add canonical tags on website pages that end in .aspx? If you add a canonical tag to the Master Page it will put that exact canonical tag on every page, which is bad. Is there a different version of the tag to put on individual pages? And one to put on the home page without the Master Page error?
Web Design | | Ryan-Bradley0 -
Crawl Budget vs Canonical
Got a debate raging here and I figured I'd ask for opinions. We have our websites structured as site/category/product This is fine for URL keywords, etc. We also use this for breadcrumbs. The problem is that we have multiple categories into which a category fits. So "product" could also be at site/cat1/product
Web Design | | Highland
site/cat2/product
site/cat3/product Obviously this produces duplicate content. There's no reason why it couldn't live under 1 URL but it would take some time and effort to do so (time we don't necessarily have). As such, we're applying the canonical band-aid and calling it good. My problem is that I think this will still kill our crawl budget (this is not an insignificant number of pages we're talking about). In some cases the duplicate pages are bloating a site by 500%. So what say you all? Do we just simply do canonical and call it good or do we need to take into account the crawl budget and actually remove the duplicate pages. Or am I totally off base and canonical solves the crawl budget issue as well?0
