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    4. Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

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    Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

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    • ColesNathan
      ColesNathan last edited by

      The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DonnaDuncan
        DonnaDuncan last edited by

        ColesNathan,

        Have you seen what Google has to say about canonicals? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

        You might find it helpful. They list reasons why you might want to use a canonical tag including those identified above and a few others, for example, for letting Google know your priorities when it comes to crawl budget and SERP display.

        Canonicals can also help undermine plagiarism. If scrapers leave your self-referencing canonical intact, it will tell Google you are the originator of that content and consolidate link signals into your URL.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Martijn_Scheijbeler
          Martijn_Scheijbeler @ColesNathan last edited by

          Correct, I would usually advise adding in a self-referencing canonical tag to make it easier for audits and search engines to understand what the actual content is on the page.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • ColesNathan
            ColesNathan @GastonRiera last edited by

            Hi, thanks for getting back to me. Ok so you don't need a canonical on every page unless its required.

            However, for tracking purposes it is good practice to have one set up on all pages?

            Have I got that right ?

            Nathan

            Martijn_Scheijbeler 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • GastonRiera
              Gaston Riera last edited by

              Hi there!

              It is a best practice as long as you have a CMS or any system that allows you to control them. In the case of Wordpress with YOAST it is pretty easy to set up.
              Why would you want a canonical on every page? This is useful when you have different campaigns and you use url parameters for tracking (the common _utm from Google analytics), and that is correctly taken care of with wordpress+YOAST.

              If you see that you dont need canonicals on any page, then dont use it. Just be sure that when generating parameters o duplicate content, there is a canonical.

              Hope i´ve helped.
              Best luck.
              GR

              ColesNathan 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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