Canonical Link Tag on every page for Google's benefit?
lee_sufc
11:13 pm on Nov 26, 2013 (gmt 0)
My site is 50% static HTML and 50% Wordpress. On each of the Wordpress pages, there is <link rel='canonical' href='...> on each page with a link back to that page.
My question is; should I do this on the rest of my site (static pages)? Is there any benefit to doing it?
JD_Toims
12:24 am on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
I do even on sites that are canonicalized via htaccess without much chance of on-site duplication, just because if there's a lazy or forgetful scraper out there who copies a page(s) and forgets to change it then their copy is pointing to the original as the source.
Basically I go with the theory of: "Can't really hurt, but could help, so why not?"
Robert Charlton
7:45 am on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
Canonicalization errors can occur on static pages as well as dynamic pages. The rel="canonical" link provides some extra insurance. As JDT suggests, why not use it?
lee_sufc
7:59 am on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
Thanks, guys.
Just to confirm, on each page I should only be inserting <link rel='canonical' href='link to page'> and nothing else?
JD_Toims
9:16 am on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
Yes, just make sure it goes in the <head></head> section or it will be ignored for security reasons [if it wasn't ignored in the <body></body> section someone could come along and drop it in the comments on sites that allow them, etc] and it's best to use a fully-qualified URL, so
[edited by: JD_Toims at 9:29 am (utc) on Nov 27, 2013]
lee_sufc
9:20 am on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
Excellent, thanks everyone!
lee_sufc
1:46 pm on Nov 27, 2013 (gmt 0)
sorry - could I just ask one more question?
We <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> our 'cart' page as we have no need to index this and also want to prevent any https pages being indexed.
Although this is 'no-index' should I still use the canonical tag for the http version?
(hope this makes sense!)
phranque
7:02 am on Nov 28, 2013 (gmt 0)
the link rel canonical is an indexing suggestion for google, so if you have specified a meta robots noindex element, the link rel canonical is irrelevant.
