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
-
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
Hi I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary? Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name thank you
On-Page Optimization | | lina_digital0 -
Do non-canonical pages need to worry about things like Alt Text, H1 tags, etc?
Just wanted to confirm, if we have multiple similar pages, with all of their canonicals pointing towards the prime page, does it impact SEO rankings at all if the non-canonical pages were missing alt text from their images, or shared duplicate or multiple H1 tags? Basic SEO page construction stuff? I know some will hurt user CTR but wanted to make sure that SEO crawlers don't care about them even if indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonZM2 -
Canonical URL Category and Tags
Hello, I would like to know that I want to use both category and tags in my blog StylishMahi. If I index both category and tags, should I use canonical URL tag to pass referring to main category. As I want more my categories in SERP results ranking higher? I have also attached a picture. Can someone please confirm? Photo by Moz ZigdWMx
On-Page Optimization | | PratapSingh0 -
Does Google penalize a page with the image tag with alt and without src?
Hi, I am curious whether Google penalizes a page with the image tag with a value in the "alt" attribute and without one in the "src" attribute? Would this count as stuffing? Sometimes you cannot put an image but you would like to get SEO benefit by having a keyword in an image?
On-Page Optimization | | Plivo0 -
Home Page Keywords not Ranking and Assigned to Inside Pages
Hi, thank you for taking the time to read this. We have a few websites with the same problem. I will use http://www.prepared-meals.com as an example: The home page was ranking on page one for keyword "Prepared Meals". The site is about 6 months old. We use the Moz page optimizer on all pages of our websites to score an A rating. Recently we found the home page is no longer showing up in search results and the keyword "prepared meals" now points to an inside page that is not relevant: http://www.prepared-meals.com/Senior-Meals/Moms-Meals-Reviews.html this page shows up for Prepared Meals around page 15 in Google results. We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of. Again, thank you for you for your time. -Craig
On-Page Optimization | | CraigSWD0 -
Why isn't our site being shown on the first page of Google for a query using the exact domain, when its pages are indeed indexed by Google
When I type our domain.com as a query into Google, I only see one of our pages on the homepage, and it's in 4th position. It seems though, that all pages of the site are indexed by google when I type in the query "site:domain.com". There was an issue at the site launch, where the robots.txt file was left active for around two weeks. Would this have been responsible for the fact that another domain ranks #1 when we type in our own domain? It has been around a couple of months now since the site was launched. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | featherseo0 -
Do alt tags count towards on page keyword density?
Hello...I have written a bunch of content for my site using a useful tool called Scribe SEO which recommends keyword density at 5% if I remember correctly. So all my my newly written content is below this level but I am left wondering if by adding alt tags with my chosen keywords I will be considered to be over the limit and cause a red flag? Can anyone clarify this for me please?
On-Page Optimization | | Wallander0 -
Using commas in the title tag?
Is there a disadvantage/advantage to using commas to separate words in the title tag. Which will be more effective as a title tag: "keyword1 keyword2 - Brand" OR "keyword1, keyword2 - Brand"?
On-Page Optimization | | Audiohype0