Is having "rel=canonical" on the same page it is pointing to going to hurt search?
-
i like the rel=canonical tag and i've seen matt cutts posts on google about this tag. for the site i'm working on, it's a great workaround because we often have two identical or nearly identical versions of pages: 1 for patients, 1 for doctors.
the problem is this: the way our content management system is set up, certain pages are linked up in a number of places and when we publish, two different versions of the page are created, but same content. because they are both being made from the same content templates, if i put in the rel=canonical tag, both pages get it. so, if i have:
http://www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp and http://www.myhospital.com/professional-condition.asp and they are both produced from the same template, and have the same content, and i'm trying to point search at http://www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp, but that tag appears on both pages
similarly, we have various forms and we like to know where people are coming from on the site to use those forms. to the bots, it looks like there's 600 versions of particular pages, so again, rel=canonical is great. however, because it's actually all the same page, just a link with a variable tacked on (http://www.myhospital.com/makeanappointment.asp?id=211) the rel=canonical tag will appear on "all" of them.
any insight is most appreciated!
thanks! brett
-
Yes
-
Got it. Dr.Pete have done excellent work on similar blog post. Right?
-
So, Does it really matter to add rel=canonical tag in each pages? Can I remove from web page?
It does matter, and you should not remove the canonical tag.
One example on the page you referenced is the following URL: http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/umbrella-stands?dir=asc&order=name
On the page you referenced visitors can change the default ORDER BY Position to ORDER BY Name (as an example) which changes the URL. Both pages are the same content but displayed different, which is exactly the type of issue canonicalization is designed to correct.
-
I am not getting clear idea by this answer. I am searching solution which may help me to solve same question.
I would like to share my URL.
http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/umbrella-stands
This page have rel=canonical tag for same page as follow.
<link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/umbrella-stands](view-source:http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/umbrella-stands)" />
Website does not contain any duplicate page which is associated to this page. So, Does it really matter to add rel=canonical tag in each pages? Can I remove from web page?
-
Hi Brett.
Steven is correct. I think it will be helpful if I offer a bit more clarification.
www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp
www.myhopsital.com/professional-condition.asp
www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp?id=1
Those three URLs may point to the exact same page or very similar pages. Google simply wont index all 3 pages as it does not offer any user benefit. The best thing to do is tell Google which of these 3 pages is the primary page you wish listed. By placing the same canonical tag on all 3 pages, you are indicating to Google which page you wish listed.
With the above tag placed in all 3 pages, then Google knows in the first URL example they are dealing with the original page, and in the next 2 examples they are dealing with a copy.
NOTE: I am unsure why two users disliked this reply. It is correct. If I were to stretch, I can add that Bing stated their preference the canonical tag not used on a page who's URL matches the canonical, but they seem to handle it well with no issues.
-
With rel='canonical' you want to point all existing pages that have the same content to 1 page. Having a rel='canonical' on the page with itself as the href will not hurt, can only help verify that it is the preferred page.
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
-
Quick Fix to "Duplicate page without canonical tag"?
When we pull up Google Search Console, in the Index Coverage section, under the category of Excluded, there is a sub-category called ‘Duplicate page without canonical tag’. The majority of the 665 pages in that section are from a test environment. If we were to include in the robots.txt file, a wildcard to cover every URL that started with the particular root URL ("www.domain.com/host/"), could we eliminate the majority of these errors? That solution is not one of the 5 or 6 recommended solutions that the Google Search Console Help section text suggests. It seems like a simple effective solution. Are we missing something?
Technical SEO | | CREW-MARKETING1 -
Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?
My guess is that in time Google will realize that my duplicate content is not actually duplicate content, but in the meantime I'd like to get your guys feedback. The reporting in Webmaster Tools looks something like this. Duplicates /url1.html /url2.html /url3.html /category/product/url.html /category2/product/url.html url3.html is the true canonical page in the list above._ url1.html,_ and url2.html are old URLs that 301 to url3.html. So, it seems my bases are covered there. _/category/product/url.html _and _/category2/product/url.html _ do not redirect. They are the same page as url3.html. Each of the category URLs has a canonical URL of url3.html in the header. So, it seems my bases are covered there as well. Can I expect Google to pick up on this? Why wouldn't it understand this already?
Technical SEO | | bearpaw0 -
Rel= Canonical
Almost every one of my product has this message: Rel Canonical (Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. ) What is the best way to correct this?
Technical SEO | | tiffany11030 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
is pointing to the same page that it is already on, is this a problem?
So we have a wordpress site with the all-in-one-seo-pack installed. I have just noticed in our crawl diagnostics that a canonical tag has been put in place on every single one of our pages, but they are all pointing to the pages that they are already on. Is this a problem? Should I be worried about this and delve more deeply to figure out as to why this has happened and get it removed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cttgroup0 -
My homepage+key pages have dropped 40+ positions after implementing redirects and canonical changes. HELP!
Hi SEOMozers, I work for a web based nonprofit at www.tisbest.org. I had a professional contact recommend that we work on our redirects to our homepage because we were losing valuable rank benefit. This combined with getting sick of seeing our weekly SEOMoz crawl reports show 304 duplicate page and title errors for months. No one could seem to figure out what was happening (we think it had to do with session stuff; we were seeing several versions of each page showing the following: www.tisbest.org/default.aspx/(random character string) My developer and I read a bunch of articles and started making changes 10 days ago: He setup 301 redirects from http://tisbest.org to http://www.tisbest.org. (set the canonical domain). We did a redirect from http://www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to root with "/". I set the canonical setting to www.tisbest.org in our webmaster tools. In our web config (we're running in asp.net), we changed our session detection from auto-detect then saw some session funkiness so we changed it back. Though we do think the character strings we were seeing were session GUID. He forced lower case URL’s to reduce duplicate page content/titles. I got my weekly crawl report 9 days ago and we had dropped from 340 duplicate page title and page content errors went to one. We went nuts and felt like the kings of SEO. Then, yesterday (9/28), the SEO grim reaper came knocking when I received my weekly SEOMoz ranking report. It said we had dropped 40+ spots for all of 9 of our keywords. Sure enough, I searched our keywords and our website was gone. Then I searched our company name, tisbest, and only a few of our pages show but not the homepage. I searched for our URL www.tisbest.org, and I originally got the expanded view (with 8 links to various webpages - can't remember what this view is called) but now, today (Saturday), the expanded view is gone from this search result. Also, when I run the On Page Report card for our homepage, I get the following error message with no results: "We were unable to grade that page. The page did not load. Curl::Err::TooManyRedirectsError: Number of redirects hit maximum amount." When I run the Open Site explorer report, I get this message at the top: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.tisbest.org/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?" If I go to the report for the that report's page, it says that "No information is available for that URL." Just tonight (night of 9/29), our developer added the rel="canonical" href="http://www.tisbest.org" /> to our homepage tonight to see if that would help. We did not do that originally. In our Google Webmaster tools, I am seeing the number of URL Error - Not Followed has sky rocked. I have attached a screen capture to this thread. There are also a large number of URL Errors - Not Found errors as well. I did some research tonight and downloaded and ran Screaming Frog SEO Crawler. I have attached a screen capture below with this report and a couple of questions I sent our developer that may be helpful to you. Also, not sure if this is relevant, we use a master page that all of our pages inherit from so all of our pages get the same meta-data: name="keywords" content="charitable gift card, charitable gift certificate, non profit gift card, charity donation, giftcard, charity gift card, donation gift card, donation gift, charity gift, animal gift card, animal gift, environmental gift card, environmental gift, humanitarian gift card, humanitarian gift, christian gift card, christian gift, catholic gift card, catholic gift, religious gift card, religious gift" />id="ctl00_metaDescription" name="description" content="Award winning Charity Gift Card, for over 250 premier charities. A customized donation gift that makes the world better. TisBest is BBB Accredited." />name="google-site-verification" content="EfJIhN3h2SVSXdSpUbfceBVw2q6zrGX8rRQhdNZ1xY8" /><title></span><span> </span></p> <p>Can anyone help me/us identify the issue that obliterated our rankings? I am happy to give an information needed. Thank you! Chad Edwards</p> <a download="Bqcu1.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/Bqcu1.png" target="_blank">Bqcu1.png</a> <a download="ZXQ8d.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/ZXQ8d.png" target="_blank">ZXQ8d.png</a></title>
Technical SEO | | TisBest0 -
What to do about "blocked by meta-robots"?
The crawl report tells me "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". One of these interesting facts is that my blog archives are "blocked by meta robots". Articles are not blocked, just the archives. What is a "meta" robot? I think its just normal (since the article need only be crawled once) but want a second opinion. Should I care about this?
Technical SEO | | GPN0 -
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
When using the On page report card I get a critical error on Rel Canonical Im not sure if I have understood this right but I think that my problem is that I own a Norwegian Domain name which is www.danske-båten.no This domain works great in norwegian, but I get problems with english (foreign) browsers. My english domain name is http://www.danske-båten.no. When you buy a domain name with the letter Å you get a non norwegian domain name as well. (dont quite get the tecnical aspect of it) Så when I publish a page (using wordpress if that means anything) I get this message: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.danske-båten.no/ferge-oslo-københavn/"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So What to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | stlastla
</dd> </dl>0