Ahh, this helped answer my question: https://moz.com/community/q/rel-canonical-tag-back-to-the-same-page-the-tag-is-on

Thanks All. Going to mark this question as answered.

I guess I just don't understand the purpose of doing that. If it's the original, why put the tag on it? What additional information is that tag providing? (I'm a novice here, and appreciate your help explaining )

Thanks so much for this. I'm a little confused about pointing a canonical tag to itself. Is there any information on this you can send over that would help me understand? Or an example of what that tag would look like.

Thanks Martijn

Hi there,

Wondering how to deal w/ about 300+ pages on our site that are autogenerated & considered thin content. Here is an example of those pages: https://app.cobalt.io/ninp0

The pages are auto generated when a new security researcher joins our team & then filled by each researcher with specifics about their personal experience. Additionally, there is a fair amount of dynamic content on these pages that updates with certain activities.

These pages are also getting marked as not having a canonical tag on them, however, they are technically different pages just w/ very similar elements. I'm not sure I would want to put a canonical tag on them as some of them have a decent page authority & I think could be contributing to our overall SEO health.

Any ideas on how I should deal w/ this group of similar but not identical pages?