rel-canonical on homepage

zee007 · Feb 28, 2014

Why would anyone put a rel canonical tag on the homepage? I've seen it appear a few times now for multiple clients. Is it just an oversight or is there a real reason to do this?

I see it on the homepage like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/" />

mderif88 · Feb 28, 2014

Any form of a URL is considered by search engines to be different pages that should have unique content.
This canonical is trying to clear up any instance of someone linking to the homepage using a URL that isn't a plain "non-www" version of the home page.
So if it starts with "www" or ends with /index/ or /Index/index/ search engines should refer to the plain "non-www" version.

edit: I hope this was clear enough, I was going to post whole links as an example, but I am too new to that.

zee007 · Feb 28, 2014

mderif88 said:
Any form of a URL is considered by search engines to be different pages that should have unique content.
This canonical is trying to clear up any instance of someone linking to the homepage using a URL that isn't a plain "non-www" version of the home page.
So if it starts with "www" or ends with /index/ or /Index/index/ search engines should refer to the plain "non-www" version.

edit: I hope this was clear enough, I was going to post whole links as an example, but I am too new to that.

It does not make sense because this tag should be placed on the pages that are considered duplicate or close in terms of content.

For example, if B, C and D are all identical to A, then they should all have re-canonical tags placed on them pointing back to A. In my case, the rel-canonical tag is placed on A telling search engines to point back to A. Does not make sense to me.

mderif88 · Feb 28, 2014

I don't think it harms your site at all to have a canonical tag on the correct page, as long as you have the duplicates covered, then you should be fine.

rel-canonical on homepage

zee007

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