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.
Rel="canonical" on home page?
-
I'm using wordpress and the all in one seo pack with the canonical option checked. As I understand it the rel="canonical" tag should be added to pages that are duplicate or similar to tell google that another page (one without the rel="canonical" tag) is the correct one as the url in the tag is pointing google towards it.
Why then does the all in one seo pack add rel="canonical" to every page on my site including the home page? Isn't that confusing for google?
-
There are mixed opinions on using it on every page, but I think it's very useful on the home-page, for exactly the reasons that @donford suggests. It's easy for the home-page to get a bunch of variants indexed, including tracking parameters.
Originally, Google said that canonical wasn't proactive, but they've eased up on that. Worst case, they may just ignore it, but the All-In-One SEO approach on a blog isn't a bad bet. It's just so easy for dynamic sites to spin off duplicate URLs that it's better to be proactive.
I've never seen a penalty or devaluation due to using canonical when it's not necessary. I think Bing implied that they may ignore it if they see it too often, but I've never even seen a concrete example of that happening. It's so commonplace now that you'd hear about it if sites were being penalized.
-
It would also make sense if you're home page generates something like
www. A Site.com
www. A Site.com/
www. A Site.com/index.php
www. A Site.com/index.php/This prevents duplicate page content issues as those pages while the exact same, are different URL's. The canonical tag should point to a single page whichever one is the real url for your site.
Hope that helps,
Don
-
it is confusing indeed.. had the same problem but read a lot about in on internet and Woj Kwasi is absolutely right.
It tells google, hey look, this is the original page with this original content.
also: use it in combination with htaccess files and you should be able to fix every problem
-
It's just saying to Google that the page it's on is the originator of the content
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
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.
We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are. Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | Palmbourne0 -
Why is Google replacing my meta title with the business name on home page?
For all queries that return the home page, Google is not showing my meta title. Instead it replaced it with the official business name which of course makes it harder to rank for key terms since they don't exist now in the meta title. You can see this is you search on "mt view estate planning attorney". The site in question is dureelaw.com and the title showing is "The Law Office of Daniel L. DuRee." View the source and you'll see my meta title. Why is Google substituting it?
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse0 -
Can "window.location" javascript on homepage affect seo?
Hi! I need to add a splashpage to my wordpress site. I use "window.location" javascript on the homepage to redirect on the splashpage (controlled by cookie to redirect only for the first access). Can this technique affect the SEO on homepage? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | StudioCiteroni0 -
Need I add rel="dofollow" or not?
Hello, My website is http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com is using the href links without meta tag rel="dofollow" such as I am using . Should I put ref="dofollow" in this: Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
What does the "base href" meta tag do? For SEO and webdesign?
I have encounter the "base href" on one of my sites. The tag is on every page and always points to the home URL.
On-Page Optimization | | jmansd0
