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
-
Magento 1.9 SEO. I have product pages with identical On Page SEO score in the 90's. Some pull up Google page 1 some won't pull up at all. I am searching for the exact title on that page.
I have a website built on Magento 1.9. There are approximately 290,000 part numbers on the site. I am sampling Google SERP results. About 20% of the keywords show up on page 1 position 5 thru 10. 80% don't show up at all. When I do a MOZ page score I get high 80's to 90's. A page score of 89 on one part # may show up on page one, An identical page score on a different part # can't be found on Google. I am searching for the exact part # in the page title. Any thoughts on what may be going on? This seems to me like a Magento SEO issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CTOPDS0 -
In Search Console, why is the XML sitemap "issue" count 5x higher than the URL submission count?
Google Search Console is telling us that there are 5,193 sitemap "issues" - URLs that are present on the XML sitemap that are blocked by robots.txt However, there are only 1,222 total URLs submitted on the XML sitemap. I only found 83 instances of URLs that fit their example description. Why is the number of "issues" so high? Does it compound over time as Google re-crawls the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Canonical URL's For Two Domains
We have two websites, one we use for Google PPC (website 1) and one (website 2) we use for everything else. The reason is we are in an industry that Google Adwords doesn't like, so we built a whole other website that removes the product descriptions as Google Adwords doesn't approve of many of them (nutrition). Right now we have that Google Adwords approved website (website 1) no-index/no-follow because we didn't want to run into potential duplicate content issues in free search, but the issue is we can't submit it to Google Shopping...as they require it to be indexable. Do you think removing the no-index/no-follow from that website 1 and adding canonical URL's pointing to website 2 would resolve this issue (being able to submit it to Google Shopping) and not cause any problems with duplicate content? I was thinking of adding the canonical tag to all pages of website 1 and point it to website 2. Does that make sense? Do you think that would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Long term strategy to retain link 'goodness', I need some help!
Hi, I have a few questions around the best approach to retain as much link juice / authority from transitioning multiple domains into 1 single domain over the next year or so. I have 2 similar websites (www.brandA.co.uk and www.brandB.co.uk) which I need to transition to a new website (www.brandC.co.uk) over the next 2 years. Both A&B are established and have there own brand value, brand C will be a new website. I need to start introducing the brand from website C onto A&B straight away and then eventually drop the brands from A&B and just be left with C. One idea I am considering is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandA.brandC.co.uk (brandA sits as a subdomain on brandC website) Ultimately over time I would drop the subdomain (brandA) and just be left with www.brandC.co.uk The other option is: www.brandA.co.uk becomes brandC.co.uk/brandA...with the same ultimate aim as above. In both above case the same would be done for brandB, either becoming a subdomain of a folder on brandC website What I need to know is what is the best way to first pass any SEO goodness from the websites for brandA and brandB to the intermediate solution of either brandA.brandC.co.uk or brandC.co.uk/brandA (I see this intermediate solution being in place for approx 2 years). And then how to transition the intermediate solution into just having brandC.co.uk Which solution will aid growing the SEO goodness on the final brandC.co.uk website? Does google see subdomains as part of the main domain and thus the main domain will benefit from any links going to the subdomain or is it better to always use /folders as google sees these as more part of one website? ...or is there another option that I haven't considered? I know it's rater confusing so please give me a shout if you want anymore info. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cewe0 -
Starting Over with a new site - Do's and Don'ts?
After six months, we've decided to start over with a new website. Here's what I'm thinking. Please offer any constructive Do's or Don'ts if you see that I'm about to make a mistake. Our original site,(call it mysite.com ) we have come to the conclusion, is never going to make a come back on Google. It seems to us a better investment to start over, then to to simply keep hoping. Quite honestly, we're freakin' tired of trying to fix this. We don't want to screw with it any more. We are creative people, and would much rather be building a new race car rather than trying to overhaul the engine in the old one. We have the matching .net domain, mysite.net, which has been aged about 6 years with some fairly general content on a single page. There are zero links to mysite.net, and it was really only used by us for FTP traffic -- nothing in the SERPS for mysite.net. Mysite.NET will be a complete redesign. All content and images will be totally redone. Content will be new, excellent writing, unique, and targeted. Although the subject matter will be similar to mysite.COM, the content, descriptions, keywords, images -- all will be brand spankin' new. We will have a clean slate to begin the long painful link building process.We will put in the time, and bite the bullet until mysite.NET rules Google once again. We'll change the URL in all of our Adwords campaigns mysite.net. My questions are: 1. Mysite.com still gets some ok traffic from Bing. Can I leave mysite.com substantially intact, or does it need to go? 2. If I have "bad links" pointing to mysite.com/123.html what would happen if I 301 that page to mysite.NET/abc.html ? Does the "bad link juice" get passed on to the clean site? It would be a better experience for users who know our URL if they could be redirected to the new site. 3. Should we put Mysite.net on a different server in a different clean IP block? Or doesn't matter? We're willing to spend for the new server if it would help 4. What have I forgotten? Cheers, all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DarrenX0 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0