Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices

[webestate]

I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com  has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget  has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?

[Adam.Whittles]

Hi Nathan,

Personally I think it is good practice to use canonical tags for all pages (even those without duplicates).

Although you may not have duplicates of these pages on your site, other sites may try to scrape the content of your site including its pages. As you have the canonical tag on these pages, any content scraper will also add the canonical tag that points to the page on your site. Therefore it is a good idea to have the canonical tag as a preventative measure also.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

[donford]

I'll add this to what Crimson said,

It doesn't hurt to have canonical tags on all pages.

[webestate]

Thanks Adam for posting a response.  Very helpful.  I read an article about pagerank sculpting and it got me thinking about the best use of canonical, robots.txt files, etc...

My site currently does not have any canonical tags or any of the others used to channel page rank.  I have been told that the proper use of certain tags can possible help with rankings by directing page rank to the more important pages.

[Adam.Whittles]

You're welcome.

It's important to note that the use of canonicals or redirects is not intended for directing page rank. They are primarily used to direct users to the most appropriate page and to avoid any duplicate content issues with search engines.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd generally agree with (and thumbed up) Adam - it's harmless and can sometimes help sweep up any stray URLs. I find it especially useful for the home-page, which naturally has a lot of variants.

I'd only add that you often see this in place not so much because it's strategic but because it's easier to implement, especially in a CMS. Telling the system to add a canonical to every version but the canonical URL is a lot more of a pain, so most people don't do it. Originally, Google and Bing suggested this was their preferred method, but it was so immediately obvious that it's easier to put the tag on all versions that I think they completely reversed that.

I've never seen it cause any harm, and I've seen it help a bit more than once.

[webestate]

Thanks for the post Peter!

In addition to the canonical tag are there any others that you guys have heard of people having success with?

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, not sure what you mean. Site-wide tags, or tags that perform canonicalization?

[webestate]

Sorry about not clarifying that

Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)

I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question

[webestate]

Sorry about not clarifying that

Tools or tags used to channel spidering and indexing and circulate page rank (e.g. robots.txt file, pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev", x-robots-tag, etc.....)

I just read an article on pagerank sculpting in visibility magazine that inspired my question

[Dr-Pete]

I prefer to think of it as "index control", since PR sculpting has a history of being abused, but you've covered the big ones. Obviously, good site architecture is the first step. If they tag exists in 2012, I pretty much covered it in this article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world