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  4. Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?

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Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?

Technical SEO
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  • tjhossy
    tjhossy last edited by Jan 13, 2013, 1:57 PM

    I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name).

    I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way?

    Thanks!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Dr-Pete
      Dr-Pete Staff last edited by Jan 14, 2013, 8:08 PM Jan 14, 2013, 8:08 PM

      I have to disagree about link juice. In many cases, canonical tags will work much like 301-redirects, and do seem to pass link-juice. I've even seen experiments where people used canonical tags to move an entire domain. I wouldn't recommend it (except in rare cases), but it seemed to work.

      I am concerned, though, that you're linking internally to one version, but then using canonical to point to another version. I find that's a bad idea - while it sometimes works, you're sending a mixed signal, and it can cause problems for your SEO efforts. I personally think that a truly canonical URL should be used consistently across the site, including in internal links. Internal links are one of your strongest canonicalization cues.

      Unfortunately, it's hard to say if link-juice is being passed, given the mixed signal. I'm afraid there's no great way to measure it, at least on the level of the individual link. I should add that Google also isn't a big fan of setting a canonical to page 1 of search results. They'd generally rather you canonical to a "View All" or use rel=prev/next. Canonical isn't always a good bet for pagination these days.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Andropenis_Australia
        Andropenis_Australia last edited by Jan 13, 2013, 10:49 PM Jan 13, 2013, 10:49 PM

        The canonical tag only really tells the spiders there is similar content on the page that you've used the tag for, I wouldn't say that is passes any real "juice" as you call it.

        You should probably restructure your links if you want the full benefit.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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