Rel=Canonical Tag on Homepage

[JMSCC]

I have a Rel=canonical Tag (link rel="canonical" href="htttps://homepage.com") on the homepage. Could this possibly have a negative effect? is it necessary?

[Ham1979]

It's not necessary to point a canonical tag back to itself. Seems to be a debate about whether or not it's negative but on the whole it's a misuse of the tag to itself.

From reading around, the only advantage would be if someone where to scrape your content and the canonical link would still be in the html assuming they don't remove it so you would get the credit.

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

It's not necessary, because you are pointing the same URL, there is no actual canonicalization.
Personaly I believe that it will not do any harm, but its redundant. And it's not advisable to have redundant code.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[TimHolmes]

I would suggest having a bit of a read over this old blog post which gives  you the necessary info to implement the rel=canonical tag correctly.

https://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I do not think that having the rel=canonical tag pointing to itself would necessarily harm your site, but it is probably best to avoid this if possible as is redundant code. If you have a dynamic meta / header include this might be the best solution for you if you cannot control it manually or by editing the code. I often have the rel canonical running in numerous pages, especially to help reduce MVT pages from being indexed.