Need Help Urgent! (rel=canonical)

tazarbm said:

google says to put it in quotes, Ahrefs says without quotes, even the pros have troubles knowing which one is true

Do the pages without quotes rank? If they do, don't touch them! If they don't you should wrap the tag in quotes.

But my question is other.... that is, do all of those ~1000 pages really need this tag? Because AFAIK canonical tags should only be included on the most important pages and only if those pages have duplicate / similar pages. That's the most frequent use of canonical tags, and I fail to see how all of those 1000 pages are totally unique among themselves to warrant their own canonical tag. That's what I'd like to know...

Click to expand...

lazyAF said:

Good Question - are those totally unique to have canonicals? NO.
They are all duplicates with the same content. 98% of the same content. The only difference is keywords.
They are what our team calls - COUNTRY PAGES.
It has the same page design, the same content, & and the same keywords; the only difference is a country name at the tail of the keyword. (eg. Best Ganja America, Best Ganja Spain, and so on.)

Back in early 2022, we were struggling to get any sustainable traffic, and that's when our team decided to canonicalize the Country pages that were created since the inception of the website. To my surprise, 60% of them are now indexed. Traffic is the same, though. But domain visibility has increased. As for any high-competition keyword of our domain, If you add some country and if we have that country page, that page ranks in the top 10. But take only that high-competition keyword. We are not in the top 50.

Now there are ~20K pages like that, We have only canonicalize 1000. The idea now is to canonicalize them all. I'm being silent on this thing because I'm fairly new to SEO and learn something new everyday, and also the indexed pages proves otherwise.

Click to expand...

tazarbm said:

so, you're trying to rank at the top of each country for a certain keyword by canonical-spamming, that's how I'm reading your reply... Not that I have anything against your method, but google might catch it and penalize you somehow, so be ready for this

To be honest, I don't know what to tell you. Personally, if this was my site and I cared about it I wouldn't canonicalize all pages...

Maybe someone can help you better with this, but I will say what I just said in my initial reply: if those pages rank do not touch them because it looks like google's fine with either version of the tag, so it's not worth stressing over it. And for the other pages use a plugin (I think most good SEO plugins can canonicalize pages in bulk) but enclose the tag in quotes, just for good measure

Click to expand...

lazyAF said:

In my defense I don't have much say in this. Either I canonicalize those pages or make way for others that will do it.
Plus we are self hosted so IDK any plugins that'll do this loop task. I use python script to add those canonicals.

Click to expand...

yalang said:

You're trying to rank at the top of each country for a certain keyword by canonical-spamming---- that's one thing you are better without because after spending so much time on it you will essentially be losing a lot when the google ban-hammer strikes out all of your pages at one go.

So in essence, I agree with @tazarbm. I wouldn't have done the same.

That being said, any changes made now would really expose this plan of action in the making, so I would rather leave it as is.

Click to expand...