Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
-
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them?
I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included.
Thank you.
-
This is also advised as a part of the on page optimization within the Moz grading system
"Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today."
-
It's best practice to put canonicals on every page of your site, so that Google never gets confused by things like URL parameters. This can usually be automated by most modern CMSs.
-
The rel="canonical" was introduced to avoid duplicate content issues. It has nothing to do with links, internal or external.
You use rel="canonical" to tell search engines which version of a page you prefer to be indexed.If you prefer to tell nothing, or if there is no way a page may get indexed with a different URL then you don't need to use rel="canonical".
You are saying that your page has no external links pointing to it - but how can you control that? I may find your page, like it and link to it! This is how backlinks are supposed to work.
As you probably know each url can we written in different ways and still point to the same content. What if you prefer your page to be indexed as http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage and I instead link to http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpage/ (note the ending /)? In these cases using rel="canonical" may help not losing any link juice.
I hope this helps.
-
The canonical tag is unnecessary if you don't have problems with URL variations (tracking parameters, session ids, etc). Don't just think about external links though, if your own CMS or internal linking structure links to the same pages in different ways, the canonical tag can be a patch while you work on a development fix.
All that being said, I'm a fan of having it on every page.
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Should I use the on classified listing pages that have expired?
We have went back and forth on this and wanted to get some outside input. I work for an online listing website that has classified ads on it. These ads are generated by companies on our site advertising weekend events around the country. We have about 10,000 companies that use our service to generate their online ads. This means that we have thousands of pages being created each week. The ads have lots of content: pictures, sale descriptions, and company information. After the ads have expired, and the sale is no longer happening, we are currently placing the in the heads of each page. The content is not relative anymore since the ad has ended. The only value the content offers a searcher is the images (there are millions on expired ads) and the descriptions of the items for sale. We currently are the leader in our industry and control most of the top spots on Google for our keywords. We have been worried about cluttering up the search results with pages of ads that are expired. In our Moz account right now we currently have over 28k crawler warnings alerting us to the being in the page heads of the expired ads. Seeing those warnings have made us nervous and second guessing what we are doing. Does anybody have any thoughts on this? Should we continue with placing the in the heads of the expired ads, or should we be allowing search engines to index the old pages. I have seen websites with discontinued products keeping the products around so that individuals can look up past information. This is the closest thing have seen to our situation. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated! -Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mellison0 -
Where the "fudge-nuggets" are my internal links?
Ok, so... Google Webmaster Tools Internal Links are not showing any links to my site's homepage. I only link to the homepage by wrapping the logo with the link throughout the site. Does Google need these to be text links to show them? [/](<a class=)" title="Kona Coffee">![](<a class=)http://1s93mbet6ccj5zkm31703gqj8.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/kona-coffee-1.png" alt="Kona Coffee"/> Site is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AhlerManagement
http://goo.gl/4C8GKc Could CDN image source be affecting it? Lost... please help!0 -
Using Pagination for eComm Reviews Pages
Hi All, An eComm site has product pages where only 10 customer reviews are found in the source code on the product page, no matter how many reviews the product actually has. ALL reviews (including the 10 displayed on the product page) are located on a subdomain, split into many pages dependong on how many reviews a certain product has (some have well over 100 unique reviews). Reviews page: http://reviews.americanmuscle.com/0065-en_us/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan/american-muscle-wheels-amr-charcoal-wheel-pirelli-tire-kit-18x8-05-14-all-reviews/reviews.htm Corresponding product page: http://www.americanmuscle.com/charcoalamr-18x8-0512-pirelli-stan.html I'm fearing a Panda related problem here, especially since thousands of products have only 1 or two reviews, duplicated on the reviews.americanmuscle.com page and the corresponding product page. I also do not want to lose the unique content on the second and third reviews pages simply by noindexing/canonicaling them to the product page. My question is whether or not I can paginate the reviews.am pages in a way that the product page is "page 1" and the first reviews page is "page 2," second reviews.am page is "page 3" and so forth. Are there issues associated with domain-to-subdomain pagination? Can I utilize the pagination tab in this manner in the first place? There are currently more than 57,000 of these review.americanmuscle.com pages in the index that I would like to clean up so any/all suggestions are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
Using the Word "Free" in Metadata
Hi Forum! I've searched previous questions, and couldn't find anything related to this. I know the word "free" when used in email marketing can trigger spam filters. If I use the word "free" in my metadata (title tag, description, and keywords just for fun) will I be penalized in any way? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Rel canonical issues on wordpress posts
Our site has 500 rel canonical issues. This is the way i understand the issues. All our blog posts automatically include a rel=canonical to themselves.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | acs111
eg a blog about content marketing has: Should this tag point to one of the main pages instead so the link juice is sent back to our home page?0 -
How to keep the link juice in E-commerce to an "out of stock" products URL?
I am running an e-commerce business where I sell fashion jewelry. We usually have 500 products to offer and some of them we have only one in stock. What happens is that many of our back links are pointed directly to a specific product, and when a product is sold out and no longer is in stock the URL becomes inactive, and we lose the link juice. What is the best practice or tool to 301-redirect many URLs at the same time without going and changing one URL at a time? Do you have any other suggestions on how to manage an out of stock product but still maintain the link juice from the back link? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ikomorin0