Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?
-
If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?
-
In my opinion, you want the juice for each article to stay with each article. I wouldn't redirect all your article juice back to the main /blog page. For me, each unique page (and article) gets its own canonical link and one line = one set of information. Article about oranges, article about apples, both canonical links. You should only get juice from same or similar pages, such as
But not
-
hey matt, thanks for the response. let me ask you this. i have a blog page with a bunch of snippets, that when clicked, lead to the full articles, (each have their own custom page/url). if i want all the juice to go to the main blog page i don't want to have canonical tags on each individual post page, right?
-
Agreed. You page can sometimes end up with query parameters as well when people link to your site, and having the canonical in place will help you avoid having duplicate content.
-
It shouldn't hurt you if it doesn't need it but assuming you have www and non-www, wouldn't that part of the canonical always help anyways? By default, you would have
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded
http://yoursite.com/notagneeded
and if you're on most common CMSs,
http://www.yoursite.com/notagneeded/index.php or index.html or index.asp
It would actually be pretty rare to have a page with absolutely no use for rel=canonical but I don't see why it would hurt at all.
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
-
Location of body text on page - at top or bottom - does it matter for SEO?
Hi - I'm just looking at the text on a redesigned homepage. They have moved all the text to the very bottom of the page (which is quite common with lots of designers, I notice - I usually battle to move the important text back up to the top). I have always ensured the important text comes at the top, to some extent - does it matter where on the page the text comes, for SEO? Are there any studies you can point me to? Thanks for your help, Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart2 -
Is having a site map page necessary?
Hello all! So I know having a sitemap XML file is important to include in your robots.txt file. I also know it is important to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing. However, I am wondering if it is beneficial for your site's SEO value to have a sitemap page displayed on your website? Or is this just a redundant action if you have already done the above two actions with your XML sitemap? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | Myles920 -
Is placing an H1 tag below a slideshow a bad practice?
Hello All, It is to my understanding that it is a best practice to have a single H1 headline that corresponds to your title tag at the top of your page, above your content for the best On-Site Optimization. We are developing a site that uses a big slideshow with text on each slide, and are concerned that placing the H1 Headline below this will be a bad practice. Would a better option be to have the slide show text on the image and place no alt tags on the slides, so that the crawlers accessing the page overlook this and see the H1 below the slider first? We need to maintain the slider for design purposes, but would like the site to optimized. A similar example to what the slider will look like is as follows: http://www.boviskyle.com/ However, we look to have optimized, "10x" content below the slider with a solid H1 headline as well. Thank You!
Web Design | | Armen-SEO0 -
Website Home page suddenly disappeared after changing Hosting
HI All, My site was ranking very well and was in 1st page of google for most of my keywords. Last week we did some update to the site and moved it to new hosting and from then onwards I dont see my site home page in Google ranking . My Website Name is : royalevents.com.au. We used to be in 1st of Google for keywords like wedding Mandaps, Indian Wedding Mandaps etc, Would be great if some one helps us to figure out whats gone wrong .. I also did Webmaster Fetch as Google but nothing happened. Thanks
Web Design | | Verve-Innovation0 -
Wordpress - redirecting tags
I just ran a webmaster tool from Yoast SEO premium and notice I have a lot of problems with tags (restricted-robots-txt) For example : http://www.soobumimphotography.com/tag/wedding-group-photo/ Do I have to redirect to http://www.soobumimphotography.com/wedding-group-photo/ Should I do this to each and every posts Thank you
Web Design | | soobumim0 -
Too Many Outbound Links on the Home Page - Bad for SEO?
Hello Again Moz community, This is my last Q of the day: I have a LOT of outbound links on the home page of www.web3.ca Some are to clients projects, most are to other pages on the website. Can reducing this to the core pages have a positive impact on SEO? Thanks, Anton
Web Design | | Web3Marketing870 -
Other tags inside an H1 tag
So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy. The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it". To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a . Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well. An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes" In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that. In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it: -H1-
Web Design | | EscaladeSports
Big Shoes
-span- for Big Guys -/span-
-div- Nike
-span- Shoes -/span-
-/div-
-/H1- So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1? The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...1 -
What else should you call the Home page?
In the menu bar and footer the main page is called Home. Would it confuse people to rename it to Business Name Home or Business Name? How do you handle this?
Web Design | | CFSSEO0