Canonical code set up correctly?

[DR70095]

Please let me know if this makes sense. I have a very limited knowledge of technical SEO but I am almost positive that my web developer did something wrong.

I have a wordpress blog and he did add canonical code to some of the pages. However he directs the site to the same URL! Does this mean that the canonical code is setup incorrectly and actually harming my SEO performance.

Also if I have one webpage with just the first paragraph of a blog post I wrote and a completely seperate page for the blog post itself, could this be considered duplicate content?

Thanks!!

[MoosaHemani]

Interesting question!

Canonical tags are used to inform search engine about the preferred version of the website when there are two identical pages available on the website and removing anyone of them is not possible.

If the page is not identical to any other page on the website not having a canonical tag or canonical tag of the same URL make sense to me but if the page is identical to some other page that which is preferred then you should include the URL of that page.

For example:

http://www.example.com/543256 is a unique page on the website then not having a canonical tag or having one with the same URL in the code both make sense but if page is identical to another URL let’s say: http://www.example.com/abc and the 2nd version is the preferred version in that case the first page should contain the preferred URL in the code of the first page.

It is kind of confusing but let me know if you need more help in this regards.

--

If the first para of the blog post is available on one page and the whole blog post is available on the different page then in most cases this will not be considered as a duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

[Linda-Vassily]

Are you asking about a page that has a canonical link which is the same as the URL of the page? That is quite common, and not a problem. (Take a look at the source code of this page--you will see Moz has used a canonical that is the same as the URL.)