Magento Canonical & Default Robots Settings

[BretDarby]

Hello!

I'm working with Magento 1.9 for an eCommerce site with several hundred products. Currently I understand it is best practices to use the Canonical tag, however I also have my default robots set to "Index, Follow".

Will this cause an issue having product pages set to index, follow but also having a canonical tag included?

What are some best practices regarding Magento default robots & canonical tags?

Any help is appreciated.

[BradyDCallahan]

Regardless of CMS, all pages will have the follow, index tags. This just means search engines will crawl and index the pages appropriately, as well as "follow" any links on the pages (to other internal pages and external website pages). This is standard.

While e-commerce websites can have some complicated issues in terms of duplicate content, in general it's smart to have self-referencing canonical tags applied to pages you create. This will also help keep things in order and when duplicate content gets created (in e-commerce it's inevitable).

It'll be easier to change the self-referencing tags to the appropriate URL you want indexed in favor of it.

[BretDarby]

Thanks for your response Brady. Currently I do have self referencing canonical tags applied. Sounds as if I am alright leaving the default to index, follow, and using WMT to monitor what is being indexed. Thanks again Brady!