Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
-
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
-
In my opinion, you want the juice for each article to stay with each article. I wouldn't redirect all your article juice back to the main /blog page. For me, each unique page (and article) gets its own canonical link and one line = one set of information. Article about oranges, article about apples, both canonical links. You should only get juice from same or similar pages, such as
But not
-
hey matt, thanks for the response. let me ask you this. i have a blog page with a bunch of snippets, that when clicked, lead to the full articles, (each have their own custom page/url). if i want all the juice to go to the main blog page i don't want to have canonical tags on each individual post page, right?
-
Agreed. You page can sometimes end up with query parameters as well when people link to your site, and having the canonical in place will help you avoid having duplicate content.
-
It shouldn't hurt you if it doesn't need it but assuming you have www and non-www, wouldn't that part of the canonical always help anyways? By default, you would have
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded
http://yoursite.com/notagneeded
and if you're on most common CMSs,
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded/index.php or index.html or index.asp
It would actually be pretty rare to have a page with absolutely no use for rel=canonical but I don't see why it would hurt at all.
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
-
Reason for robots.txt file blocking products on category pages?
Hi I have a website with thosands of products. On the category pages, all the products are linked to with the code “?cgid” in the URL. But “?cgid” is also blocked in the robots.txt file for some reason. So I'm thinking it's stopping all my products getting crawled by Google. Am I right here? Is there any reason why a website would want to limit so many URL's? I'm only here a week and the sites getting great traffic, so don't want to go breaking it!!! Thanks
Web Design | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Spaces at beginning of title tag - negatively affect the optimization of the page?
For some reason, our title tags have a long space after the beginning title tag and before the text appears. The beginning title tag is on one line, then a break, a tab and then the content of the title tag. I'm pretty sure this is not good and is affecting optimization of the page. Am I correct or is this not an issue and does not need to be fixed? Example: | <title></span></p> <p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"> First keyword</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Wordpress: Pages vs Posts vs Portfolio
Hi All, I'm looking to put pen to paper and design my main structual template for my website. I will be creating the new site in Wordpress. My understanding of Wordpress is broken into the Static Pages, Posts and Portfolio. Static PAGE
Web Design | | Mark_Ch
Static one off content.
No tags, categories or archived Posts
content entries, which is listed in reverse chronological order.
Update post entry to maintain overall freshness of your website.
tags, categories & archived Portfolio
????? Question What are the benefits of a portfolio page over Static Pages & Posts When creating feature rich articles should i use static pages, posts or portfolio. Thanks Mark0 -
Wordpress - redirecting tags
I just ran a webmaster tool from Yoast SEO premium and notice I have a lot of problems with tags (restricted-robots-txt) For example : http://www.soobumimphotography.com/tag/wedding-group-photo/ Do I have to redirect to http://www.soobumimphotography.com/wedding-group-photo/ Should I do this to each and every posts Thank you
Web Design | | soobumim0 -
What seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page?
what seo benefit does setting up a photo gallery where each photo is a separate web page? My old SEO guy set up my photo gallery like that claiming that because each photo was a separate page, it added a big seo benefit and i never understood what he was talking about. Maybe alt text on the photo with key phrases in it pointing to my other pages to give my site a theme for google? I'm not really sure. He has since moved away and i am considering redoing the photo gallery to multiple images on one page to be more user friendly to my users. This photo gallery is 3 years old and the photos might have some page rank to them helping my site so i don't want to remove this gallery if there really is a benefit to it and it will hurt my site. I once removed four static page rank 3 pages from my site that weren't used for my site anymore and my rankings dropped 5 positions. Thoughts anyone? Thanks! Ron
Web Design | | Ron100 -
Link colour on page?
I always thought that the link colour has to be different from text colour? I have come across a site http://www.printandpackaging.co.uk/ and it has made me question this belief, they seem to only have bolded the link which would be very nice if this is fine.
Web Design | | BobAnderson0 -
What is the best tool to view your page as Googlebot?
Our site was done with asp.net and a lot of scripting. I want to see what Google can see and what it can't. What is the best tool that duplicates Googlebot? I have found several but they seem old or inaccurate.
Web Design | | EcommerceSite0 -
Correct Canonical Reference
Aloha, This is probably a noob question, but here we go: I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such: Instead of: rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx" I get: rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx" Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely. Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?
Web Design | | dimanyc0