proper use of rel=canonical

Hi everyone,

I took on a new client and want to get confirmation from the community if I am using rel=canonical correctly.

1st instance:

there are a few different dynamic urls of the home page, mostly to track referral traffic from other domains that are owned. I made sure they put the rel=canonical tag set for the home page to fix this. This seems good enough for me.


2nd instance.

User created file pages. For various reasons we don't want google indexing these pages. So we set the meta tag to no index, disallowed crawling in the robots.txt, but since we know that people are linking to these pages, I wanted to take advantage of that by setting the rel=canonical to the homepage.

there are about 20k of these types of pages (at least).

Does this seem like the right steps to take?

Thanks in advance to anyway that can help. I will give thanks and rep to anyone that can confirm this for me

The main use of the canonical tag is to use dupe content on another page and point it towards the main page you want to rank best. Don't do it multiple times to the same page as this doesn't work.

Doing a content no-index isn't necessary if you are pointing to the target page as the power of that page will get passed on to the page it's canonizing to.