Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

[ColesNathan]

The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

It is a best practice as long as you have a CMS or any system that allows you to control them. In the case of Wordpress with YOAST it is pretty easy to set up.
Why would you want a canonical on every page? This is useful when you have different campaigns and you use url parameters for tracking (the common _utm from Google analytics), and that is correctly taken care of with wordpress+YOAST.

If you see that you dont need canonicals on any page, then dont use it. Just be sure that when generating parameters o duplicate content, there is a canonical.

Hope i´ve helped.
Best luck.
GR

[ColesNathan]

Hi, thanks for getting back to me. Ok so you don't need a canonical on every page unless its required.

However, for tracking purposes it is good practice to have one set up on all pages?

Have I got that right ?

Nathan

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Correct, I would usually advise adding in a self-referencing canonical tag to make it easier for audits and search engines to understand what the actual content is on the page.

[DonnaDuncan]

ColesNathan,

Have you seen what Google has to say about canonicals? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

You might find it helpful. They list reasons why you might want to use a canonical tag including those identified above and a few others, for example, for letting Google know your priorities when it comes to crawl budget and SERP display.

Canonicals can also help undermine plagiarism. If scrapers leave your self-referencing canonical intact, it will tell Google you are the originator of that content and consolidate link signals into your URL.