Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
-
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
-
It is Bing that says it is incorrect, not me.
"To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website."You are correct in that it does say, "no need for that" and says the use is incorect. So why do it?
-
Actually, there is more to the article. It says there is "no need for that" referring to adding a canonical tag to a page referring to itself. It is a stretch to say such usage is "incorrect".
I did what I could to re-read the article and try as objectively as possible to see your viewpoint but was unsuccessful. I asked two other people to read the article and they also were not able to come to the same conclusion. I think you are very very pro-Microsoft/Bing, which is not a bad thing except it seems you may add extra significance to certain statements made by MS/Bing.
Alan, we can go back and forth but there is no further point. Your position, as well as mine, are well set. Neither of us will successfully convince the other to change opinions on this topic without the introduction of new information. The original person who asked the question has been satisfied and made his or her decision. I'm going to let this topic go.
Best Regards
-
atcualy Rayn, the snpitt you cut from the article
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you.
in full reads
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website.I would not advice using it in all pages
-
No it is Bings claim
If you have posted the quote in full from bing it reads
To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. But, it doesn’t
help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages,
yet correctly across a few others on your website.So to say it is a indutrsty standard, is simple not correct.
I think the argument is between you and bing.
-
So it is your opinion that Google, SEOmoz, Distilled and countless others misuse the tag? We will just have to disagree on this point.
The canonical tag has been out for close to three years. I like Duane Forrester. I link Bing. But Bing is not the dominant player in search. They don't make the rules. The fact last month Bing announced their opinion that it is inappropriate to use the canonical tag on the same page is interesting. It's interesting.
If Duane or Bing explicitly shared they would penalize sites for using the tag on the same page as the referred to canonical link then it would rise above "interesting" to something which we might consider taking action upon. Instead, Bing took the opposite approach and clearly stated "To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you".
-
The industry best standard would be to use it properly, that is use it to point to a canonical page. not to put it in the canonical page. that what it is for. That is what one of the main industry players advises. the other said they can cope with it in the pointed at page, but did not advise it.
Putting it in each page is a misuses, as i underrstadn it it is done to stop screen scaping, that is not the correct use of the tag.
-
Thanks everyone for the great answers.
My website contains over 216,000 pages, most of them being search result pages with canonical urls.
I can't justify adding extra code that points the link juice to the same page it's on so I'll leave the canonical url off the target page.
I'll be monitoring the behaviour and will report back if I notice anything.
-
There are many sites which generate 20+ canonical versions of a page for every primary version. You have the print version along with both ascending and descending for 10 fields such as price, color, size and many other fields. In these cases a 301 should not be used and a canonical tag should be used.
Again, I think you are misinterpreting the article's intent Alan. The exact quote is "it doesn’t help us trust the signal when you use it incorrectly across thousands of pages, yet correctly across a few others on your website." In the above situation, it would not be a misuse. It is exactly what the tag was designed for.
If Bing wants to disregard the canonical tag on pages where it points to the same page, they are clearly wise enough to do so with a single line of code. If they penalize sites for an industry best practice when they are clearly not the dominant player in the field, they wont last. Bing seems to be a good group of people who are making all the right moves to be more competitive with Google. I trust them to intelligently handle this situation in a similar manner to Google.
-
The best we can do in this Q&A is offer our knowledge and feedback and leave it up to others to make their decision. For my clients I will follow the current industry best practice.
I have reviewed the information you shared by Bing and I have to believe even Bing does not penalize sites on any level for use of the canonical tag in the manner described in this thread. Some quotes from the Bing article you mentioned:
"To be clear, using the rel=canonical doesn’t really hurt you. "
When speaking about using rel=canonical to list the same web page the tag appears on the article says "No need for that." but never suggests there is any penalty for doing such. I would further back down to the above quote where they said it "doesn't hurt you" and common sense to say there is no penalty.
Alan, I appreciate your sharing the Bing point of view. It makes us think critically and differently about various scenarios. I asked two others to read the same article you mentioned and no one else interpreted the same way you did. After considering all the information available on the topic I still feel it is a best practice to use the canonical tag on every page of a site.
-
I think the canonical is a last resort, you should fix the problems in other ways. Variation of a url should be fixed with a 301 if possible
bing will ignore you canonicals will lose trust in your site if the are not used correctly, eg: on every page,
-
Agree,
There are many possible variations of same URLS, not under site owner control - different ?parametrs etc. So better add cannonical to each page.
-
Well i would want to optimize it for 100% if posible, adding a canonical to the pointed at page does not optimize if for Bing or Google.
Bing may penalize you for having it in without having that intent, it may be a side effect of somthing else.
If i made a screen scapper, i would remove canonical tags annd absolute links.
The point ios a canoncal cannot pass all link juice or you would get infinte loops, rthere must be some decay, and if as Duane says, it assigns value to itsself, then it would not pass alll that value.
-
I read that article from Bing and knowing it exists I would not change my response nor my practice. The logic is:
-
The quote says "there is no need" for it, but does not indicate it is harmful
-
It would frankly be very dumb for Bing to penalize a site for a practice which is not visible to users, exists solely for search engines and otherwise does no harm. It would be easiest and smartest for them to simply disregard the tag if they felt it was not useful.
-
Ultimately site owners need to decide how to best optimize their site. Do you want to optimize for Google which controls 70% of the market? Or Bing+Yahoo which is maybe 30%?
Adding a canonical tag not only provides a layer of protection against scrapers, it helps against various CMS and human errors where pages are copied accidentally or intentionally.
-
-
Not recommened by bing
The only reson i can see it being useful, to maybe save you if you are screen scraped, but I think anyone that screen scapes woul also look out for canonical tags.
SEOMoz does it, they recommend it in web apps, for the reason i gave , this is why I started doing it. But sicne them bing has recommened not to do it.
i have a suspision that it may even be a link juice leak, as Duane forrested states
"Pointing a rel=canonical at the page it is installed in essentially tells us
_“this page is a copy of itself. Please pass any value from itself to itself.” _
No need for that."Could that mean it leaks link juice on that hop? Or does it double up on value?
-
I would suggest the most commonly accepted industry best practice is to place a canonical tag on every page.
Google does it. Check http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
SEOmoz does it. Check this Q&A thread.
Distilled does it. Check their home page: http://www.distilled.net/
I would not say it is "necessary" but it can be a helpful.
-
You are correct, they do not need to be on the pointed at page. In fact Bing states they should not be as they can confuse the Bot.
A canonical is like 301 that does not physicly move the user, but passes and link juice to the pouinted at page.
You would not have a 301 on the destination page 301ing to itself.
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
-
Changing URL's During a Site Redesign
What are the effects of changing URL's during a site redesign following all of the important processes (ie: 301 redirects, reindexing in google, submitting a new sitemap) ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer-garcia0 -
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Google indexing "noindex" pages
1 weeks ago my website expanded with a lot more pages. I included "noindex, follow" on a lot of these new pages, but then 4 days ago I saw the nr of pages Google indexed increased. Should I expect in 2-3 weeks these pages will be properly noindexed and it may just be a delay? It is odd to me that a few days after including "noindex" on pages, that webmaster tools shows an increase in indexing - that the pages were indexed in other words. My website is relatively new and these new pages are not pages Google frequently indexes.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Do I need a canonical tag on the 404 error page?
Per definition, a 404 is displayed for different url (any not existing url ...). As I try to clean my website following SEOmoz pro advices, SEOmoz notify me of duplicate content on urls leading to a 404 🙂 This is I guess not that important, but just curious: should we add a cononical tag to the template returning the 404, with a canonical url such as www.mysite.com/404 ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo0 -
How can I change my website's content on specific pages without affecting ranking for specific keywords?
My client's website (www.nursevillage.com) content has not been touched for 4 years and we are currently ranking #1 for "per diem nursing". They do not want to make any changes to the site in fear that it might decrease our rankings. We want to try to use utilize that keyword ranking on specific pages (www.nursevillage.com/nv/content/careeroptions/perdiem.jsp ) ranking for "per diem nursing" and try redirecting traffic or placing some banners and links on that page to specific pages or other sites related to "per diem nursing" jobs so we can get nurses to apply to our new nursing jobs. Any advice on why "per diem nursing" is ranking so high for us and what we can change on the site without messing up our ranking would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ryanperea1000 -
Canonical category pages
A couple of years ago I used to receive a lot of traffic via my category pages but now I don't receive as much, in the past year I've modified the category pages to canonical. I have 15 genres for the category pages, other than the most recent sorting there is no sorting available for the users on the cat pages, a recent image link added can over time drop off to page 2 of the category page, for example mysite.com/cat-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-23. New image link can drop off to page 2. mysite.com/dog-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-53. New image link can drop off to page 2. mysite.com/turtle-page1.html = 100 image links per page with numbered page navigation, number of cat pages 1-2. New image link can drop off to page 2. Now on the first page (eg mysite.com/cat-page1.html) I've set this up to rel= canonical = mysite.com/cat-page1.html One thing that I have noticed is the unique popup short description tooltips that I have on the image links only appears in google for the first pages of each category page, it seems to ignore the other pages. In view of this am I right in applying canonical ref or just treating it as normal pages.? thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Flapjack0