Do I put a canonical tag on the page I am pointing to?
-
Lets say B i a duplicate page of A (main page). I understand I have to put canonical tag under B to point to A. Do I also put canonical tag under the main page A? Is it necessary? I understand that A would then tell Google that it is preferred page of A? Is this a correct understanding?
-
Yes, I'd also put the canonical tag on Page A referencing the Page A URL.
In general, self-referencing canonical tags are a good thing to implement site-wide. Then, when you do need to make a change and have one duplicate page's canonical tag point to another URL (in this case, Page B to Page A), the tag is already in place and you can make the change more easily.
But if self-referencing tags are in place from the beginning, they can also help squash lots of other duplicate content problems that end up occurring on more complex websites.
Hope that makes sense!
-
Best practice you should put the canonical tag onto the main page as well as the other pages.
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
-
How will canonicalizing an https page affect the SERP-ranked http version of that page?
Hey guys, Until recently, my site has been serving traffic over both http and https depending on the user request. Because I only want to serve traffic over https, I've begun redirecting http traffic to https. Reviewing my SEO performance in Moz, I see that for some search terms, an http page shows up on the SERP, and for other search terms, an https page shows. (There aren't really any duplicate pages, just the same pages being served on either http or https.) My question is about canonical tags in this context. Suppose I canonicalize the https version of a page which is already ranked on the SERP as http. Will the link juice from the SERP-ranked http version of that page immediately flow to the now-canonical https version? Will the https version of the page immediately replace the http version on the SERP, with the same ranking? Thank you for your time!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JGRLLC0 -
Site's pages has GA codes based on Tag Manager but in Screaming Frog, it is not recognized
Using Tag Assistant (Google Chrome add-on), we have found that the site's pages has GA codes. (also see screenshot 1) However, when we used Screaming Frog's filter feature -- Configuration > Custom > Search > Contain/Does Not Contain, (see screenshot 2) SF is displaying several URLs (maybe all) of the site under 'Does Not Contain' which means that in SF's crawl, the site's pages has no GA code. (see screenshot 3) What could be the problem why SF states that there is no GA code in the site's pages when in fact, there are codes based on Tag Assistant/Manager? Please give us steps/ways on how to fix this issue. Thanks! SgTovPf VQNOJMF RCtBibP
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Pages with Duplicate Page Content (with and without www)
How can we resolve pages with duplicate page content? With and without www?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | directiq
Thanks in advance.0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Canonical Tag - Question
Hey, I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly. The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine. My questions are: Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com? Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys... If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0