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    4. Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document

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    Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document

    Technical SEO
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    • ahmadmdahshan
      ahmadmdahshan Subscriber last edited by

      Error: Missing Canonical Tag
      But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?

      Tom.Capper 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • equipmentmanual
        equipmentmanual @Adnan-farooq last edited by

        @Adnan-farooq said in Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document:

        i don't think that we used canonical tag for PDF document i think no option is visible on moz 👎

        Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • equipmentmanual
          equipmentmanual @Adnan-farooq last edited by

          Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Adnan-farooq
            Adnan-farooq last edited by

            i don't think that we used canonical tag for PDF document i think no option is visible on moz 👎

            equipmentmanual 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Tom.Capper
              Tom.Capper Subject Expert @ahmadmdahshan last edited by

              @ahmadmdahshan

              There's two answers to this.

              One is that whilst it's best practice for all URLs to have a canonical (even if it's self-referencing), if this resource has no duplicates, it's not mandatory.

              The other is that yes, you can add a canonical tag to a web page. You'd have to do it at the HTTP header level.

              https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls#rel-canonical-header-method

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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              Related Questions

              • GAnalytics

                Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page

                canonical indexation search page categorization search results crawl

                Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!

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