Should Canonical be used if your site does not have any duplicate
-
Should canonical be used site wide even if my site is solid no duplicate content is generated.
please explain your answer
-
Hi Guy,
Does this help...
Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.
Source:http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
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
-
how to set rel canonical on wordpress.com sites
I know how to do this with a wordpress.org site but I have a client that does not want to switch and without a plugin I am lost. any help would be greatly appreciated. Jeremy Wood
Technical SEO | | SOtBOrlando0 -
Should I use a canonical tag or 301 with Wordpress posts?
Hi all, I'm trying to determine if canonical or 301 is a better way of handling an issue on my site. The Background I've got a Wordpress website where pages are in-depth reference articles and the posts are for short news blurbs. When I produce a new resource page, I also make a short post telling readers about the new resource. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plug in. Sometimes, Google will rank the 200 word post higher than the 2000 word resource page. I suspect that is because of the order in which they were crawled by Google, but I do not know for sure. The Question To make sure that the resource page is seen as the most important location on the site for the topic, should I use the canonical section in the Yoast plugin on the post to point to the page? Or should I wait, and after a few days (when the news blurb is off of the first page) just 301 the post to the page? Are there any link juice considerations when using the canonical option? Thanks for the help! Richard
Technical SEO | | RichardInFlorida0 -
How to fix duplicate content errors with Go Daddy Site
I have a friend that uses a free GoDaddy template for his business website. I ran his site through Moz Crawl diagnostics, and wow - 395 errors. Mostly duplicate content and duplicate page title I dug further and found the site was doing this: URL: www.businessname.com/page1.php and the duplicate: businessname.com/page1.php Essentially, the duplicate is missing the www. And it does this 2 hundred times. How do I explain to him what is happening?
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Staging site and "live" site have both been indexed by Google
While creating a site we forgot to password protect the staging site while it was being built. Now that the site has been moved to the new domain, it has come to my attention that both the staging site (site.staging.com) and the "live" site (site.com) are both being indexed. What is the best way to solve this problem? I was thinking about adding a 301 redirect from the staging site to the live site via HTACCESS. Any recommendations?
Technical SEO | | melen0 -
Duplicated content in news portal: should we use noindex?
Hello, We have a news portal, and like other newspapers we have our own content and content from other contributors. Both our content and our contributors content can be found in other websites (we sell our content and they give theirs to us). In this regard, everything seems to work fine from the business and users perspective. The problem is that this means duplicated content... so my question is: "Should we add the noindex,nofollow" tag to these articles? Notice that there might be hundreds of articles everyday, something like a 1/3 of the website. I checked one newspaper which uses news from agencies, but they seem not to use any noindex tag. Not sure what others do. I would appreciate any opinion on that.
Technical SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
Meta data & xml sitemaps for mobile sites when using rel="canonical"/rel="alternate" annotations
When using rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" annotations between mobile and desktop sites (rel="canonical" on mobile, pointing to desktop, and rel="alternate" on desktop pointing to mobile), what are everyone's thoughts on using meta data on the mobile site? Is it necessary? And also, what is the common consensus on using a separate mobile xml sitemap?
Technical SEO | | 4Ps0 -
Searching in Google using the Site:www.example.com specification - is it in an order?
Hi Gurus, Just a quick searching question. If you do a Google search using the site: specification eg. site:www.example.com Is the list returned by Google in an order of something similar to 'Page Authority' or some other order eg. page first seen date etc. Because you are looking at your single site, is Google listing your pages back to you in it's perceived order of current 'popularity'? Thanks, Brad
Technical SEO | | BM70