Using Canonical Tags on Every Page

[Ksink]

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

[Ksink]

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.

[DirkC]

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.

[Hutch42]

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.

[Ksink]

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.

[DirkC]

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