Canonical tag refers to itself (???)
-
Greetings Mozzers.
I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous:
What I've seen is that on some pages like:
There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this
link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical"
It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential?
Cheers
Jorge
-
Thank you Gentlemen!!!
-
Canonical page is for search engines and implies the 'best url to index in basis the page content'
So - if there is this url you are on to and also has canonical tag attached to it - Its no harm. Generally, its been used to avoid duplicate pages by marking canonical url in header on the duplicate pages. In event of doing so, even if original page has same canonical url - its no harm.
-
I agree, this is not an issue. It merely tells search engines which page is the 'canonical' version you want displayed in search. In fact I've seen it recommended that sites can use a self referential canonical in order that it affords some 'protection' for your pages from content scrapers which automatically steal content.
-
Its not a "redirecting to itself", its just tell the user and bots "this is the master/true url" and my understanding is there would be not problem doing that ( I seen a good few systems doing that with no problem)
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
-
Will canonical solve this?
Hi all, I look after a website which sells a range of products. Each of these products has different applications, so each product has a different product page. For eg. Product one for x application Product one for y application Product one for z application Each variation page has its own URL as if it is a page of its own. The text on each of the pages is slightly different depending on the application, but generally very similar. If I were to have a generic page for product one, and add canonical tags to all the variation pages pointing to this generic page, would that solve the duplicate content issue? Thanks in advance, Ethan
Technical SEO | | Analoxltd0 -
Setting up hreflang tags
Hi everyone, A quick question about setting up your Hreflang tags. Here you can see 2 examples: As you can see, the order of the elements is different. Be aware, there is a tiny difference between the 2: the first Hreflang is written for a specific language in a specific country, the second one only contains a language code. Is this the reason why the order is different or is this just a coincidence and doesn't the order of the elements matter at all? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | WeAreDigital_BE
Jens0 -
301 Redirect Url Within a Canonical Tag
So this might sounds like a silly question... A client of mine has a duplicate content issue which will be fixed using canonical tags. We are also providing them with an updated URL structure meaning rwe will be having to do lots of 301 redirects. The URL structure is a much larger task that than the duplicate content so i planned to set up the canonicals first. Then it occurred to me id be updating the canonical tags with the urls from the old structure which brings me to my question. Will the canonical tags with the old urls redirect credit to the new urls with the 301? Or should i just wait until we have the new url structure in place and use these new urls in the canonicals? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?
I have a client who is moving to a one page website design. So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page. There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section. I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Rel Canonical for Exact Same Copy?
I've read about using rel canonical tags for product pages like "blue shorts" vs "red shorts" but if I have two pages with the exact same copy - different URL's - but same copy, can I use a rel canonical tag and be okay for duplicate content purposes? (There is is reason the page is exactly the same, at least for the time being, so I'm just focusing on how not to be get penalized as opposed to rewriting it at the moment). Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
What canonical makes sense in this particular situation?
Hi Mozzers, I am running into a situation where I am not sure what would be the canonical best practice. I am working on an e-commerce site (magento) Situation 1 : site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ Situation 2: if site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ wouldn't it make sense to have site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ (situation1) canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ instead of site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ ? and if I am right would it hurt to have both situations 1 and 2 combined? Thanks Guys!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Canonical question
I have at least three duplicate main pages on my website: www.augustbullocklaw.com www.augustbullocklaw.com/index augustbullocklaw.com I want the first one, www.augustbullocklaw.com to be the main page. I put this code on the index page and uploaded it to my site: http://www.augustbullocklaw.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" /> This code now appears on all three pages shown above. Did I do this correctly? I surmise that www.augustbullocklaw.com is pointing to itself. Is that ok? I don't know how to take the cononical code off the page that is the page I want to be the main page. (I don't know how to remove it from www.augustbullocklaw.com, but leave it on www.augustbullocklaw.com/index and augustbullocklaw.com) Thanks
Technical SEO | | Augster990 -
Should I use these Meta Tags or Remove it?
Hi, I have a lot of older pages that I am cleaning up older pages, and I see that I have <title>Actual Title</title> (I understand the importance of this tag.) (I have some text in this meta tag on a lot of pages, sometimes matching my title tag exactly but in some cases I treated it like a mini description. Should I remove the on my pages, or keep it and make sure it is the exact as the main Title Tag. -------- Question about meta tag #2. I have heard rumors that the keywords tag should be removed. example: Thanks in advance! Force7
Technical SEO | | Force70