Can I canonical the same page?
-
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page.
Example:
http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65
I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages -
When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
-
The term "canonical" comes from maths. It means "the standard form to present something in". So, if you have two or more things that are very similar or identical then you might want to say "this is the canonical version - the standard thing we will refer to".
For example, if your CMS is a bit old-school and creates two versions of a page - one human-friendly like example.com/blog-post and another horrible one like example.com?id=12397863294862395 - then you want to point search engines to the nice one and say "this is the standard, canonical version - refer to that one". So in this case you should definitely use on example.com?id=1239786329486239 to give search engines that instruction. If you also add this to example.com/blog-post then that's fine - all you are saying is "this is the standard version of this page" which is perfectly valid.
But from your question, this doesn't sound like your plan. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your plan sounds like you will tell the search engines something along the lines of "you see that blog post there, and that one there, and that one there, and that one over there? They're actually all the same thing, and the standard, canonical page you should refer to is this category page". That wouldn't be a good idea, because all of those articles are different things.
So, I wouldn't add a hard-coded canonical URL into your template. Instead - as long as your CMS allows it - add the canonical tag to the of each article and link to the search engine friendly version of each blog post.
-
Josh -
The rel=canonical tag should be used for pages that have virtually identical content.
For example, if your page is:
http://www.domain.com/articles.html... but the page also loads with:
httt://domain.com/articles.htmlThen you'd want to put a rel="canonical" link in the section of the HTML page:
Here's Google's page on the rel canonical tag:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=enWhat it sounds like you have going are multiple pages (Pagination) that list articles, and you should use the rel=prev/next to not have duplicate page content issues.
The recommendation from Moz:
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
... is to:
Either rel=canonical to a "View All" page (if having all results on one page is viable) or that you use rel=prev/next tag, as described here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.htmlHope this helps!
- Jeff
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
-
Should summary pages have the rel canonical set to the full article?
My site has tons of summary pages, Whether for a PDF download, a landing page or for an article. There is a summary page, that explains the asset and contains a link to the actual asset. My question is that if the summary page is just summary of an article with a "click here to read full article" button, Should I set the rel canonical on the summary page to go to the full article? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Autoboof0 -
Duplicate pages on wordpress
I am doing SEO on a site which is running on WP. And it has all pages and categories duplicates on domain.com/site/ However, as it got crawled I saw that all domain.com/ pages have rel=canonical with main page tag (does it mean something?). Thing is I will fix permalinks structure and I think WP automatically redirects if it is changed from /?page_id= to /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ Isn't there something I miss? Second problems is a forum. After a crawl it found over 5k errors and over 5k warnings. Those are: Duplicate page content; Duplicate page title; Overly-Dynamic URLs; Missing Meta descr; Title Element too long. All those come from domain.com/forum/ (fortunately, there are no domain.com/site/forum duplicates). What could be an easy solution to this?
Technical SEO | | OVJ0 -
Crawl Test Report only shows home page and no inner site pages?
Hi, My site is [removed] When I first tried to set up a new campaign for the site, I received the error: Roger has detected a problem: We have detected that the root domain [removed] does not respond to web requests. Using this domain, we will be unable to crawl your site or present accurate SERP information. I then ran a Crawl Test per the FAQ. The SEOmoz crawl report only shows my home page URL and does not have any inner site pages. This is a Joomla site. What is the problem? Thanks! Dave
Technical SEO | | crave810 -
Find where the not selected pages are from
Hi all Can anyone suggest how I can find where gtoogle is finding approx. 1000 pages not to select? In round numbers I have 110 pages on the site site: searech shows all pages index status shows 110 slected and 1000 not selected. For the life of me I cannot fingure where these pages are coming from. I have set my prefered domain to www., setup 301 's to www. as per below RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^growingyourownveg.com$
Technical SEO | | spes123
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http://www.growingyourownveg.com/$1" [R=301,L] site is www.growingyourownveg.com any suggestions much appreciated Simon0 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Wordpress Canonical Problem
I'm using wordpress for my website but m unable to implement Canonical tag property for pages under the same category, Like for matt's blog: The Tag is same .. for all pages under that category: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ & http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/2/ is it some hack or some plugin ? please suggest! thanks
Technical SEO | | AnkitRawat0 -
Are all duplicate pages bad?
I just got my first Crawl Report for my forum and it said I have almost 9,000 duplicate pages. When I looked at a sample of them though I saw that many of them were "reply" links. By this I mean the "reply" button was clicked for a topic yet since the crawler was not a member, it just brought them to the login/register screen. Since all the topics would bring you to the same login page I'm assuming it counted all these "reply" links as duplicates. Should I just ignore these or is there some way to fix it? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Xee0 -
Too many on page links
Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important. But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?
Technical SEO | | levalencia10