Canonical tag refers to itself (???)

[Masoko-T]

Greetings Mozzers.

I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous:

What I've seen is that on some pages like:

www.example.com/page1

There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this

link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical"

It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential?

Cheers

Jorge

[Masoko-T]

Thank you Gentlemen!!!

[Modi]

Canonical page is for search engines and implies the 'best url to index in basis the page content'

So - if there is this url you are on to and also has canonical tag attached to it - Its no harm. Generally, its been used to avoid duplicate pages by marking canonical url in header on the duplicate pages. In event of doing so, even if original page has same canonical url - its no harm.

[simon_realbuzz]

I agree, this is not an issue. It merely tells search engines which page is the 'canonical' version you want displayed in search. In fact I've seen it recommended that sites can use a self referential canonical in order that it  affords some 'protection' for your pages from content scrapers which automatically steal content.

[PaddyDisplays]

Its not a "redirecting to itself", its just tell the user and bots "this is the master/true url"  and my understanding is there would be not problem doing that ( I seen a good few systems doing that with no problem)