Rel=Canonical Help

[rock22]

The site in question is www.example.com/example.  The client has added a rel=canonical tag to this page as .  In other words, instead of putting the tag on the pages that are not to be canonical and pointing them to this one, they are doing it backwards and putting the same URL as the canonical one as the page they are putting the tag on.  They have done this with thousands of pages.

I know this is incorrect, but my question is, until the issue is resolved, are these tags hurting them at all just being there?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not entirely sure I'm understanding the situation - did they just put the canonical tag on the one page? Does that page drive any other content/URLs ("page" is a bit of a loaded term, since one file could create 100s of URLs that Google can crawl)?

If they simply added it to one page and the canonical references itself, there shouldn't be any harm. It sounds like this page is the canonical version, so you're really just telling Google that. It's not necessary, in most cases, but it's not a problem.

[rock22]

They put the tag on almost every page on the site, thinking it would solve their duplicate content issues, but they didn't realize that the tage needed to go on the non-canonical pages.  Basically, every page has the tag with the same URL that the tag is on.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh, so it's site-wide... got it. The issue is that you're basically sending Google a signal that the non-canonical URLs are canonical. It's not a disaster, but it would be better to remove them temporarily, until you can put the correct tags in place.

[rock22]

Thanks, at least I know that it's not creating any big issues for the time being until we get it all cleaned up.  Thanks again for your help!