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    4. Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?

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    Does it do harm if you add a rel="canonical" tag on a page that doesn't need it?

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    • jaychow
      jaychow last edited by

      If a page is clearly unique and there is obviously no canonical tag needed, does it hurt anything if one has been added?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • MattAntonino
        MattAntonino @jaychow last edited by

        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

        yoursite.com/

        yoursite.com/index.php

        www.yoursite.com/index.php

        www.yoursite.com/

        But not

        yoursite.com/oranges/

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • jaychow
          jaychow @MattAntonino last edited by

          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?

          MattAntonino 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • TakeshiYoung
            TakeshiYoung @MattAntonino last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • MattAntonino
              MattAntonino last edited by

              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.

              TakeshiYoung jaychow 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
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