2 Canonical questions
-
QUESTION 1
I'm working on a site where a canonical link is implemented asThat's not the normal format that I am used to, as I would have written it as
Is that a problem?
QUESTION 2
Why do so many sites these days have a sitewide canonical tag which refers to itself as the canonical?
For example: http://www.site.co.uk/page has a canonical of -
Attributes and their corresponding values can be in any order within a tag.
Having a self referring canonical tag also helps eliminate duplication issues if the site produces query strings appended to the URL. There is no ambiguity as to which is the "real" URL.
-
Q1: Both of those pieces of code mean the same thing. You can use the "attributes" (href, rel) interchangeably.
Q2: It stops page scrapers.
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
-
"Google-selected canonical different to user-declared" - issues
Hi Moz! We are having issues on a number of our international sites where Google is choosing our page 2 of a category as the canonical over page 1. Example; https://www.yoursclothing.de/kleider-grosse-groessen (Image attached). We currently use infinite loading, however when javascript is disabled we have a text link to page 2 which is done via a query string of '?filter=true&view=X&categoryid=X&page=2' Page 2 is blocked via robots.txt and has a canonical pointing at page 1. Due to Google selecting page 2 as the canonical, the page is no longer ranking. For the main keyphrase a subcategory page is ranking poorly. LqDO0qr
On-Page Optimization | | RemarkableAgency1 -
The links pointed to a multilanguage site, should increase the DA? (Wordpress question inside)
We are planning to make our site available to several language, using the plugin WPML in Wordpress. The site should look with /es/, /fr, etc. If someone point to an URL in the spanish version, the english version get any benefit from it? (better search ranking or something like that). Some side question: WPML works fine with SEO and Moz?
On-Page Optimization | | carlostinca0 -
Query string parameters and canonical links
Hello everyone, My site uses query string parameters in a few places to manage tasks like pagination of lists. Eg: http://www.example.com/destinations/somewhere?page=2 I have set a canonical link with the href of the page without the query string but still getting thousands of duplicate title/meta description reports from these pages. Is there something I can do to change this? Do search engines actually penalise for use of query string parameters like this? They seem so commonplace, even for sites which use an absolute URI with no query string to serve content. Thanks 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | JHWXS0 -
Should i make all of my pages with canonical tag
Hi, Im using thesis Wordpress theme, and their default option is "Add canonical <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym>s to your site" im just wandering if i should keep that box checked and apply canonical <acronym title="Uniform Resource Locator">URL</acronym>s to all of my pages? Thank You
On-Page Optimization | | Vmezoz0 -
Big shift in local results with Penguin 2.0?
Is anyone else seeing a big shift in local results since Penguin 2.0. I am logged out of Google, all personalisation switched off but my results are being personalised to my location for all results, not just Google+ Local results? I'm pretty sure penguin is bigger than 2.3% of queries or whatever was reported..
On-Page Optimization | | Karen_Dauncey0 -
Copyscape Duplicate Content Ownership Question
We have a site that has had its content copied verbatim to numerous other sites and articles. We were advised to change our content but the content is originally ours. Does google take that into account before they apply duplicate penalties? And shouldn't copyscape be able to show this information in their reports? It just doesnt seem right that the originating author would have to change content because everyone else is stealing it. Any clarification on this?
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
Rel=canonical Query
Hello Everyone, We have just launched our new ecommerce site for flooring in the UK. I have run through the first crawl and there are 549 instances of rel=canonical including the homepage? Is this a major issue in any way, i have never had to tackle it before and i would appreciate any advice that could be offered on the subject. Many Thanks Andrew
On-Page Optimization | | DFD20120 -
Rel Canonical
I will be quick and to the point. I am clearly a novice. I received a notice on my seomoz account that I had 12 pages with a Rel Canonical issue. It seems serious. Can this be a quick fix? Any thoughts? Below is the site address. petbarnpdx.com Thanks in advance for any input on this! Dave
On-Page Optimization | | APICDA0