Rel canonical = can it hurt your SEO

[stevecounsell]

I have a site that has been developed to default to the non-www version. However each page has a rel canonical to the non-www version too.

Could having this in place on all pages hurt the site in terms of search engines?

thanks

Steve

[YannickVeys]

I would say, Yes.

In my opinion, but I don't think there has been any concise research about this, a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect passes a lot of link juice to the page it is redirecting to, but not all. So I would say yes, this is hurting your SEO because you're not keeping all the juice you could keep when not using the rel = canonical. (or a redirect for that matter)

[stevecounsell]

Hi Yannick

Thanks for the reply. I've been working on "on page" stuff for the last month for a site and noticed that I'm getting no improvement at all in ranking.

This is very unusual I think.

The tech guys on the site are 301'ing to the non-www site AND have placed a re canonical to the non-www version too.

My thought are to have the rel canonical removed as there is a 301 (.htaccess) in place.

Thanks again

Steve

[YannickVeys]

Search enigines wont even reach the rel canical tag, because they'll be redirected before anything else loads from the www version.

Just make sure you do link building to the non www version.

[stevecounsell]

Hey Yannick. Thanks

And just to be clear. There is 1 file for each page serving bot www & non-www version with a 301 redirect pointing all requests to the non-www URL.

The rel canonical is in every file so search engines will see the rel canonical on every request.

I'm thinking this MUST have some effect on the site. What to you think?

[YannickVeys]

Ah. Yes. Delete the tag.

It's not giving the right signals if it is saying that the page you are currently on is a copy of the page you are currently on.

It's not meant to be used site wide.

Bing has an interesting article about it.

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/10/06/managing-redirects-301s-302s-and-canonicals.aspx

[stevecounsell]

Thanks Yannick, much appreciated.