Using Canonical Tags on Every Page
-
I'm doing competitive research and noticed that one of our competitors (who outranks us) uses canonical tags on every page on their site. The canonical tags reference the page they are on. For example. www.competitor.com/product has a canonical tag of www.competitor.com/product. Does anyone use this practice? It seems strange to me.
Thank you,
Kristen
-
Thanks for your response. Screaming Frog is the tool I using when I came across this (I love this tool!). I bet these are just automatically generated by their CMS. That makes the most sense as to why someone would do this in this specific example. They don't have many webpages overall.
-
If it's always identical, it doesn't seem to bring a lot of added value.
Sometimes, it's just added by default in the CMS, just in case (sometimes CMS's can generate pages you don't expect to exist). Plenty of sites are doing it (Moz as well).
The best way to know if you would need to add canonical is to check your site with a crawl tool (like Screaming Frog or Xenu's Link Sleuth). If you don't find any duplicate url's, you won't need it. You could also crawl the site of your competitor, and check if the url is always identical to the canonical (Screaming frog has this functionality). Also check your landing pages in Analytics & Webmaster tools to see if you see any abnormal url's.
Having canonical urls (apart for the duplicate content part) has no specific other advantages for SEO (but it doesn't hurt either). If your competitor is outranking you, it's probably not because of the canonical, but for other reasons.
Last, some people add canonicals to avoid scraping - they hope that the scraper will also include the canonical. Personally, I doubt that this is very useful. Somebody who scrapes content will probably also get rid of the canonical & replace it with his own url.
-
If they are doing a lot of campaigns where they would have many urls with various query strings pointing to the pages then it would make sense to just have each page generated with the tag on it.
-
Right - I understand the way that you are supposed to use canonical tags. However, they are using it on every page and it is identical url of the page they are using it on. It doesn't seem right.
-
Hi,
it's not really necessary to do it, but can be useful to make sure that the right url is being indexed and to avoid duplicate content issues.. Example - using canonical avoids that pages like site.com/index.htm&trackingid=xyz are indexed - only the correct site.com/index.htm will be indexed. Another example could be articles which could published in two sections, but only may be indexed in one section. Be carefuI, I sometimes see examples where the canonical is always identical to the url - even for the examples as given before, which basically renders the canonical useles.
If you are sure that each page of your site has one unique url than you don't need the canonical url.
rgds
Dirk
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
-
Duplicate content? - Ecommerce reviews loading the same products on every page
Hello there! I use a plugin on my ecom site that shows customer reviews - not product reviews but general shopping experience reviews. The plugin also loads links and short descriptions of products those customers bought. Having installed it site-wide, on every page there are short descriptions of the same products. Of course, as people leave new reviews the content changes (but it doesn't happen very often). So the question is: Is having links and short descriptions of the same products on every page harmful for SEO in this case? I'd be grateful for any insight into this matter.
On-Page Optimization | | thpchlk0 -
Does using Yoast variables for meta content overwrite any pages that already have custom meta content?
The question is about the Yoast plugin for WP sites. Let's say I have a site with 200 pages and custom meta descriptions / title tags already in place for the top 30 pages. If I use the Yoast variable tool to complete meta content for the remaining pages (and make my Moz issue tracker look happier), will that only affect the pages without custom meta descriptions or will it overwrite even the pages with the custom meta content that I want? In this situation, I do want to keep the meta content that is already in place on select pages. Thanks! Zack
On-Page Optimization | | rootandbranch0 -
The Keyword density in a landing page is very low . by adding meta keyword tag can improve keyword density?
The Keyword density in a landing page is very low . by adding meta keyword tag can improve keyword density?
On-Page Optimization | | socialhi50 -
What's better for SEO a page per review or a page with all reviews?
Was wondering what's better for SEO. We have a platform where consumers can read and write reviews. But the question is: is it better to give one page per company with all the reviews on it? Or should we have different pages for the specific company? Example: Itunes has a company page with all reviews on the page, but not the whole review. You have to click further to view the whole review (new page), at the moment this the current situation. What if we place the whole reviews on the company page, so you don't have specific pages for the reviews? Hopefully can someone help us out. Contact me if it's not clear or you want more extended information. Kind regards
On-Page Optimization | | MozzieJr0 -
Page rank check
Hello everyone, How long should I wait to see if page rank for optimized pages have improved? cheers
On-Page Optimization | | PremioOscar0 -
How should I rephrase these pages to avoid Phrase duplication within Title Tags
How should I rephrase these pages to avoid Phrase duplication within Title Tags Duplicate Page Title Page1-http://organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/index-2.html Page2- http://organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/Fruit_Baskets_Organic_Fruit_Baskets_New_York_NY.html Page3- http://organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/Fruit_Baskets_Edible_Fruit_Baskets_New_York_NY.html Page4organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/Fruit_Baskets_Business_Fruit_Baskets_New_York_NY.html Page5-http://organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/Fruit_Baskets_Fresh_Flowers_Delivered_New_York_NY.html Page6-http://organicfruitbasketsflorist.com/Coupons.htmlAmi
On-Page Optimization | | amydiamond0 -
How much SEO value does a fashion site get from bolting text onto the bottom of home page? Does the value compensate for cluttering up a page focused on an iconic image?
Getting ready to launch a completely redesigned site for a fashion designer. Since it is a fashion site, visitors do not need text to describe what the site is about., We are weighing three options: 1) clean design with no text (just images and navigational links), 2) bolting on a couple of sentences of text at the bottom of the page to signal keyword terms to the search engines, 3) following the lead of the top ranking site in the category and adding lots of text to the bottom of the page. Do the SEO benefits justify cluttering up the design by bolting text onto the bottom of the home page, and if so, how many characters of text seem to be the minimum to be effective?
On-Page Optimization | | RandyP0 -
Optimally, how many times should the key word or phrase you are targeting for a particular page be mentioned or appear on that page?
Our marketing team is debating how many times the key phrase on each of our web store's product pages should include the word/phrase we are trying to be competitive with. Can you advise?
On-Page Optimization | | Glynlyon0