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        4. Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?

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        Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?

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        • jaychow
          jaychow last edited by

          If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • MattAntonino
            MattAntonino @jaychow last edited by

            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

            yoursite.com/

            yoursite.com/index.php

            www.yoursite.com/index.php

            www.yoursite.com/

            But not

            yoursite.com/oranges/

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • jaychow
              jaychow @MattAntonino last edited by

              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?

              MattAntonino 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • TakeshiYoung
                TakeshiYoung @MattAntonino last edited by

                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.

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

                  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.

                  TakeshiYoung jaychow 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
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