Need a link rel="canonical"??

[O2C]

I'm getting a Craw issue in my MOZ insights which says

"It looks like you're not using the rel="canonical" META attribute on any of the pages we crawled"

Do we need to have a rel="canonical" on our site? I can't find a reason to use it so don't know why it would be appearing as a crawl error?

Thanks

[Attain-Design]

Hi David,

If you're confident enough that there is no duplicate related issues on your website, I wouldn't worry about implementing the canonical tag. You can use the tag on an individual page basis, should you feel that you need to tell Google which is the original page.

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from the Help Team here. Thanks for writing in - I think I can help here!

The notices you see in the Site Crawl section aren't necessarily errors or issues that need to be addressed - they are just pieces of information that might be helpful or interesting for you to know.

In this case, it looks like the tools are just letting you know that there isn't a rel="canonical" tag in place on the page. There's nothing wrong with that, but in many cases it's a good thing to have the tag, as it tells search engines which page to prioritize and index if there appears to be duplicate content or more than one version of a page. This isn't necessarily an issue you need to take an action to resolve, it's just some information that might be useful to you.

I hope this helps!

[O2C]

Good article. Thanks for the info

[Alick300]

Hi David,

In a perfect world, I’d say to use rel=canonical on the home-page, known duplicates, and any pages with parameters that could drive duplicate content, and leave the rest alone.

To know more on this please check @ https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Hope this helps.

Thanks