Rel Canonical for the Same Page

[ErrickG]

Hi,

I was looking in my one of my moz accounts and under analyz page under notices is a message that says:

Rel Canonical

Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical.

I checked an notice that I do have a rel='canonical' href='http://www.example.com' /> from the home page of http://www.example.com. I guess my question is.

1. Does having a Rel Canonical going to the same page hurt my SEO? I'm not sure why it is there but wanted to make sure I address this correctly. I was under the impression you use Rel Canonical for duplicate or similar pages and you want to let Google know what page to show. But since I've made this mistake to where I am saying to show the home page if you find a similar home page, should I just delete the Rel Canonical.

Thanks,
Errick

[Alick300]

Hi Errick,

That won't hurt you at all. Please watch Matt cutts video on this @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8eQgx-njk4

Thanks

[donford]

Hi Errick,

No, pointing a page to itself will not hurt you at all. This is common practice as many pages can have parameters.

So something like

thisfluffysite.com    may become

thisfluffysite.com?product=8282&sample=t

Search engines are well aware that this is why people would and do put canonical tags to itself.

In other cases you may have something like the www.thisfluffysite.com and www.thisfluffysite.com/ and no www thisfluffysite.com etc... all these would be pointing to the one in the canonical tag. In general you would want to fix this issue with 301 re-writes but in some cases that isn't possible so tag to the right version is actually how you handle it.

I have found some crawl reports tell you about it, but that is more of a curtsey than anything else.

Hope this makes sense and helps,

Don