Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
-
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
-
I prefer to think of it as "index control", since PR sculpting has a history of being abused, but you've covered the big ones. Obviously, good site architecture is the first step. If they tag exists in 2012, I pretty much covered it in this article:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
Sorry about not clarifying that
Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)
I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question
-
Sorry about not clarifying that
Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)
I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question
-
Sorry, not sure what you mean. Site-wide tags, or tags that perform canonicalization?
-
Thanks for the post Peter!
In addition to the canonical tag are there any others that you guys have heard of people having success with?
-
I'd generally agree with (and thumbed up) Adam - it's harmless and can sometimes help sweep up any stray URLs. I find it especially useful for the home-page, which naturally has a lot of variants.
I'd only add that you often see this in place not so much because it's strategic but because it's easier to implement, especially in a CMS. Telling the system to add a canonical to every version but the canonical URL is a lot more of a pain, so most people don't do it. Originally, Google and Bing suggested this was their preferred method, but it was so immediately obvious that it's easier to put the tag on all versions that I think they completely reversed that.
I've never seen it cause any harm, and I've seen it help a bit more than once.
-
You're welcome.
It's important to note that the use of canonicals or redirects is not intended for directing page rank. They are primarily used to direct users to the most appropriate page and to avoid any duplicate content issues with search engines.
-
Thanks Adam for posting a response. Very helpful. I read an article about pagerank sculpting and it got me thinking about the best use of canonical, robots.txt files, etc...
My site currently does not have any canonical tags or any of the others used to channel page rank. I have been told that the proper use of certain tags can possible help with rankings by directing page rank to the more important pages.
-
I'll add this to what Crimson said,
It doesn't hurt to have canonical tags on all pages.
-
Hi Nathan,
Personally I think it is good practice to use canonical tags for all pages (even those without duplicates).
Although you may not have duplicates of these pages on your site, other sites may try to scrape the content of your site including its pages. As you have the canonical tag on these pages, any content scraper will also add the canonical tag that points to the page on your site. Therefore it is a good idea to have the canonical tag as a preventative measure also.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
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
-
Merger & Acquisition Best Practices
Our company (DA 40) recently acquired another company (DA 20). The domain for the acquired company is up, and I am being asked if we should keep paying for the domain. I have a couple of questions regarding this. Is it best practice to continue paying for the older domain and do 301 redirects to our website? If yes, do I have to add 301 redirects for individual matching pages? For example, if the old site has the topic XYZ, should a 301 go to our site if we have a similar page topic XYZ? What about contact pages, about us, etc? Do we redirect all non-matching topics to the new home page? Or in the case of their blogs, do we redirect their blogs to the new blog home page even though we are not keeping their old blogs? What if our company keeps acquiring other companies, are we to assume we have to keep paying for the domains of the acquired companies? Is there anyone out there that would say stop paying for the old domain and just review the company's inbound links, reach out to those sites, and make sure they link to the new site instead? Thanks for the help in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CharityHBS0 -
Whats the best practice for acquisition?
Hi, My company have just bought out a competitor. We wan't to dissolve their website and if possible steal some of their link juice. The site hasn't got any spammy links or 404's so i'm not worried in that department. What I am not sure about is which of the following is best practice? a. Redirect every single page (even pages like /?checkout) to a relevant page on our website. b. Only redirect important pages, category pages, contact pages etc and leave the other pages to 404? c. Redirect the important pages to a relevant URL and redirect the less important pages to our homepage. d. Redirect the entire domain to our home page (i assume this isn't a good idea) e. Don't redirect any of the pages just delete the site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyHoodless0 -
Best Strategy for FAQ & Canonical?
I have an FAQ database setup on my site and there's about 30 questions in 6 categories so 5 questions per category which is a pretty good page size for one category. I'm trying to determine the best strategy for publishing them from both a user and SEO standpoint. From a user standpoint, I want to have one page per category. Dumping them into a page with all 30 questions is not user-friendly and some categories are very unrelated to others. I should note that Google did already index a page that does have all the questions on it, but I was just planning on changing that page to just have 6 links to each of the category pages so then I don't have to bother with 301 redirect or removing the pages in the site's Search Console. There's also an option to to link the questions for the entire FAQ or from the category list to one page with just that question and answer. So my thinking at this point is to as I said, just change the page that has all 30 questions to a list of the categories and link to category pages having the questions for that category and disable the individual question pages. Or would it be beneficial from an SEO page to have google index the individual question pages and link back to the category page and put a canonical tag on the category pages? In other words the question then becomes, index the category pages or index the individual question pages? The other issue is the answers for some of the questions are lengthy, multiple paragraphs, and the FAQ has the option to have a hide/unhide feature on the answers so you can easily see all the questions first then expand the answers on the ones you are interested in. However I thought I heard Google discounts (doesn't ignore) content that is by default hidden on page load. I guess this would then give a reason for going with the indexing of the individual question pages. But it seems to me, you can't put the canonical tag on the category pages and point it to the individual question page. And if you put the canonical tag on the individual question page linking it to the category page, then the individual page won't necessarily get indexed will it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MrSem0 -
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Pagination, Canonical Tag & Best Practices
I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header. For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL. For example, this category has 3 pages.... Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page. Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google. My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages. Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page. Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
Best time to choose a canonical URL & 301 redirect
I have taken on the task of getting a fairly huge eCommerce site more SEO friendly & have just realized that no URL has been chosen as our preferred domain. Should we designate a preferred domain now or wait until after the first of the year since we are hitting our busy period right now?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Winoman0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Google Places, Multiple locations best practice
What is the best practice with having multiple locations in Google Places. Does having multiple Google Places set up for each business have a big effect on local rankings for the individual areas? Should I use the home page for the website listed on each page or is it better to have a specific landing page for each Google Places listing? Any other tips? Thanks, Daniel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0