Canonical tag for categories

Started by Oby1KnOby, 01-28-2013, 05:31:50

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Oby1KnObyTopic starter

Hello everyone! I was wondering if anyone can give me a hand with these rel="canonical" tag, as I'm not quite sure how to set them properly for my categories and tags in news articles.

Let's say I have a news piece
www.myseite.com/news-article/

This article has 2 categories which link to
www.myseite.com/categories/funny/
www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats/

How exactly should I use rel="canonical" in this particular case? A broad answer is much appreciated...
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localnumberone2

#1
 I'd be happy to assist with rel="canonical" tags.

First, let's go through what a rel="canonical" tag is. It's a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. It is used to prevent issues caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. Essentially, a canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.

In the scenario you provided, you have a news article and two category pages. The rel="canonical" tag would typically be used in cases where the same content is accessible through multiple URLs and you want to indicate which one is the "main" or "canonical" one.

Here's how you would generally do it:

Each independent piece of content should point to itself as canonical. So, your news article page (www.myseite.com/news-article/) should have a canonical tag pointing to itself:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/news-article/" />

Each category page (www.myseite.com/categories/funny/ & www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats/) should have its own self-referencing canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/funny/" />

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats/" />

Remember, the general rule for SEO is to have a unique canonical URL for each piece of unique content.

However, things get a bit more complex when you have virtually identical content available under different URLs, or across different domains/subdomains. In those cases, you would use the rel canonical tag to point to the version you want indexed, and Google and other search engines will understand that this is the "master" version.

If you have different categories or tags pages showing the exact same article, canonical tags also come in handy. If the main content of a page is duplicated because, for instance, it shows a summary of the news article, you can include a canonical tag pointing back to the original article page. Thus the unique news content would not penalize you for duplicate content.

Lastly, remember all URLs in a canonical tag must be absolute URLs, not relative.

In your context, we have one article and two categories. Now, one common situation that calls for canonicalization is when you have paginated content or when you provide various ways to sort or filter items (like in an e-commerce catalog). In such a case, the particular articles or items may look like distinct pages to Google, but you know they're essentially the same.

However, in your case, assuming that the content under the category/funny and category/lolcats URLs are not duplicates of your news article, but rather unique listings of multiple news articles under each category, you don't need to add a canonical URL pointing to your news article from these category pages. Instead, as mentioned before, you would set a canonical tag on each of these category pages that points to itself:

<!-- For the /categories/funny/ page -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/funny/" />

<!-- For the /categories/lolcats/ page -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats/" />
The reason you'd use the above self-referencing canonical tags is to avoid any duplication complications if parameters are added to the URLs. For example, www.myseite.com/categories/funny/?page=2 should have a canonical URL of www.myseite.com/categories/funny/, to tell search engines that you prefer the base URL to be indexed.

If let's say your news article is fully displayed in both the 'funny' and 'lolcats' categories pages, creating a situation where substantial portions of content are duplicated, you might be worried about potential penalties from search engines due to repeated content. However, as of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, Google treats duplicate content in a sophisticated manner and is typically able to determine the original source and won't penalize you for unnecessary duplication like this. Using canonical tags might still be a good idea for reassurance and to guide Google's understanding of your webpage organization.

As a closing note, rel="canonical" tag is crucial when you have almost identical content on two distinct URLs, but in cases where you're simply listing out articles under different categories where every article is distinct, separate canonical tags for each article URL and each category URL would suffice.


more specifics:

Categories vs Unique Posts: Every unique article or post you create is a unique piece of content. From an SEO perspective, this is the content that search engines index and rank. On the other hand, category pages function as a sort of directory, organizing and linking to your various posts. Because of this differentiation, you should generally treat category pages and individual posts as distinct entities for the purposes of setting canonical tags.

Self-Referential Canonical Tags: As previously mentioned, every page should have a canonical tag pointing to itself, regardless of its content. So, both your category and article pages should include self-referential canonical tags. This will help ensure search engines understand the primary URL you'd like ranked for each unique page on your site.

Handling Duplicate Content: Duplicate content is often more of an issue with e-commerce or large content sites that publish article content under multiple categories or tags. These tags and categories can create additional URLs which contain the same article content, leading to issues with duplicate content. In such situations, the canonical tag should point towards the article URL, from these tag and category URL pages. This instructs search engines to consider the main article page as the source of the content.

Doing it Right: Here's an example of how the rel="canonical" setup might look like:

For www.myseite.com/news-article:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/news-article" />
And for the categories www.myseite.com/categories/funny and www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/funny" /> 

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats" />
Just to be clear and re-emphasize: On the main article page, the canonical URL points to itself. On the categorized versions of this same article, the canonical URL points back to the original/main article URL.

This setup helps search engines understand which pages have original content, and which pages have duplicate or slightly altered versions of the same content.

Remember, the goal of the canonical tag is to solve problems of duplicate content on different URLs. It's not necessary to use them when there's no duplicate content involved. But for good measure, and to handle unknown future scenarios, having canonical tags pointing to their own URL on every page is a good practice to follow.