Rel=canonical
-
I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag.
Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page.
Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense.
Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.
-
Thank you. i have set it to all pages but i will have a look for any duplicates by using Xenu program.
-
You can implement it side wide on all pages, but make sure that you do it correctly. One other added benefit is that if anyone scrapes your content, if they scrape the code that includes your canonical link, you would get proper attribution.
Also, if you do it site wide, on any pages where you do want the canonical pointing to another page, make sure that you don't overwrite those. Example, you may have the printer friendly version of a page canonical to the original version of the page - this makes sense and is a good use of canonical. You would not want to overwrite that canonical with the canonical to self.
Cheers!
-
Thanks,
Okay so you recommend add rel canonical only for homepage right?
-
The link that kosta list relates to the use of the rel=canonical for multi lingual pages.
I would point you to Dr. Pete (below) and I think he has good advice. I also love to eat cannonscicles, but that is another story. Generally, you can do it, but you need to know what you are doing to make sure that you do not screw something up.
I had an issue on a site where Google was still caching old URLs on our site, even though we had relaunched the URL structure and setup 301 redirects - over two years prior. An SEO consultant we work with suggested dropping in the self canonicalizing (sp?) links and over a period of a couple of months the old URLs were replaced in the Google SERPs and GWT report pages.
Cheers!
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
"(6) Is It OK to Put Rel=Canonical on My Entire Site?
Should you pre-emptively rel=canonical your entire site – even if many of the pages aren’t subject to duplicate content issues? I think this gets very speculative. We have recommended this approach at SEOmoz in the past, and I think it’s generally safe. I do worry that excessive use of rel=canonical could cause search engines to devalue and even ignore those tags, but I can’t point to any clear evidence of this happening. I also worry that people often implement site-wide rel=canonical tags badly, and end up pointing them to the wrong pages.
I do think that a pre-emptive rel=canonical on your home-page is generally a good ideas, as home pages are prone to URL variations. In a perfect world, I’d say to use rel=canonical on the home-page, known duplicates, and any pages with parameters that could drive duplicate content, and leave the rest alone. However, that’s often a very difficult procedure. In some cases, site-wide rel=canonical implementation is better than no index control."
-
should i use on every page since its a unique page?
or dont use it at all.
How about this ?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html
**Update: to simplify implementation, we no longer recommend using rel=canonical.
A bit of confusion.
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
-
Previously owned domain & canonical
Hi, I've recently joined the business and as part of the cleanup process I got told that we owned this domain preferredsafaris.com with some very similar content to our main site southernafricatravel.com. We're no longer owns the preferredsafaris.com domain but looking at Google's cache for it we realised that the title, meta description & page shown when looking at the 'cached page' is for our current domain even though it is showing the 'correct' URL there. I imagine this might have something to do with canonical set on those pages but the weird thing is all those pages now render 404 & do not show a canonical in the source code. I have used Google Removal Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals for all those URLs & Google says that it has removed them & yet they're still showing. What do you suggest? Any potential issue in regards to duplicate content here? Cheers, Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
Do you lose link juice when stripping query strings with canonicals?
It is well known that when page A canonicals to page B, some link juice is lost (similar to a 301). So imagine I have the following pages: Page A: www.mysite.com/main-page which has the tag: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.mysite.com="" main-page"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> Page B: www.mysite.com/main-page/sub-page which is a variation of Page A, so it has a tag I know that links to page B will lose some of their SEO value, as if I was 301ing from page B to page A. Question: What about this link: www.mysite.com/main-page?utm_medium=moz&utm_source=qa&utm_campaign=forum Will it also lose link juice since the query string is being stripped by the canonical tag? In terms of SEO, is this like a redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
How use Rel="canonical" for our Website
How is the best way to use Rel="canonical" for our website www.ofertasdeemail.com.br, for we can say goodbye for duplicated pages? I appreciate for every help. I also hope to contribute to the SEOmoz community. Sincerely,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZZNINTERNETMEDIAGROUP
Amador Goncalves0 -
Rel="canonical" questions?
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
What is the proper syntax for rel="canonical" ??
I believe the proper syntax is like this [taken from the SEOMoz homepage]: However, one of the sites I am working on has all of their canonical tags set up like this: I should clarify, not all of their canonicals are identical to this one, they simply use this naming convention, which appears to be relative URLs instead of absolute. Doesn't the entire URL need to be in the tag? If that is correct, can you also provide me with an explanation that I can give to management please? They hate it when I say "Because I said so!" LOL
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Original Source and Canonical tags
We've been using canonical links to protect site SEO for contributor content and requiring canonical of our partners (as well as tagging internal duplicate content with canonical). Most other media sites have been doing the same but this is a moving target. I'm now hearing that the original source tag is now a better option. Special focus for us is placement on google news. Any guidance?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jbertfield0 -
Rel= Author : Google suggests that we include this. Can i link to my FB profile
There have been several reference on how Google is trying to build author profiles so that it can effectively measure the authors authority based on the Rel=Author. I quite liked this idea , but my site is a user generated content website. So how can i leverage this ? . One thing which i was thinking was if its a good idea to link to the customers Facebook profile , plan to collect this during sign up.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShoutOut0 -
How to set cannonical link rel to CS CART
I whant to specify a link rel cannonical for each category page, how to do that without changing the code (just from admin section), because filters and sorting search are making the site dublicate content with their parameters; If there is a way please specify the method, i whant to avoid hours of working in a script like this. Thank's.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oneticsoft0