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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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