Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Link rel=next and prev validator?
Can I validate link next and prev markup for paginated content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Evan340 -
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 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Using a lot of "Read More" Hidden text
My site has a LOT of "read more" and when a user click they will see a lot of text. "read more" is dark blue bold and clear to the user. It is the perfect for the user experience, since right below I have pictures and videos which is what most users want. Question: I expect few users will click "Read more" (however, some users will appreciate chance to read and learn more) and I wonder if search engines may think I am hiding text and this is a risky approach or simply discount the text as having zero value from an SEO perspective? Or, equally important: If the text was NOT hidden with a "Read more" would the text actually carry more SEO value than if it is hidden under a "read more" even though users will NOT read the text anyway? If yes, reason may be: when the text is not hidden, search engines cannot see that users are not reading it and the text carry more weight from an SEO perspective than pages where text is hidden under a "Read more" where users rarely click "read more".
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Do I need to use canonicals if I will be using 301's?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: http://www.omnipress.com/boss-man" /> With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0