Canonical urls - do my web pages need them?
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Hello,
I'm going round in circles with this issue, so hopefully someone can help...
The Moz crawl of my website lists a number of pages as "missing canonical url". The pages are all different and do not have similar content.
Do I need to add a canonical url to each page? My agency quoted the following (x referencing this page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls)
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list itemYou would use Canonical URLs if:
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list item"...you have a single page that's accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page."
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list itemThis is not the case here and so we would not propose to change anything. We could add Canonical URLs if the client feels that it is critical which occurs an additional cost.
Any help / advice much appreciated.
Thanks
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@paintedbrickdigital hello! thanks for this info. i'll follow up with my agency and see where I get to! have a lovely day...
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@rj_dale if I'm reading your issue correctly, all the pages/content is unique and you simply need to ensure that you are canonical-ing back to itself, ensuring that the pages have a similar tag pointed to that unique page itself in the <head>:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/page/" />
Basically, having it point back to itself if it's a unique page is a good thing, most CMSs handle this, but sometimes creation variables stop that from happening.
Hope that answers your question (if I'm understanding what you were asking correctly)!
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