Im working on a site that has had an SEO expert review it. They have advised me that we should apply canonical tags on every other page
<!-- http://www.example.com/detail/table&r=dining-room -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/detail/table"/>
is it really required that the canonical tag only appears on every other page, or will it play nicely if it appears on the same page?
The reason I ask this is: isn't the link also telling Google that it is infact on the right page?
RFC 6596: The Canonical Link Relation specifies:
The target (canonical) IRI MAY:
o […]
o Be self-referential (context IRI identical to target IRI).
So, yes, you can use rel-canonical even on the canonical page.
It seems to be an argument between Google and Bing. Google doesn't mind if you have the canonical tag pointing to itself. Bing does mind and you lose their trust for the use of canonical tags. Look at this article: http://www.northsideseo.com/google-vs-bing-canonical-tag/
Related
I see this a lot on site title links in WordPress themes (probably because Underscores does it and everyone copies that):
Some Site Title
I cannot find even a semi-authoritative statement anywhere that rel="home" on an anchor tag is used meaningfully today by any browser, screen reader, or other user agent. The only "official" documentation I've located is this draft specification from 2005 on the microformats.org site.
That doc proposes home as a valid value on both <link> tags in the <head>, as well as <a> tags. Using it on a <link> has some pedigree from HTML v3, and there's reference to it in the wild from 2002. But I haven't seen anything about the <a> tag usage.
So, is including it helpful for anything/anyone? Would I do better to use <link rel="home"> in the <head>, or is that obsolete too in 2020?
The rel="page" was part of an initiative to create permalinks (see section 'Permalink detection') as part of a standard in HTML 4.
However with HTML 5 it now has no purpose and does not offer any accessibility or SEO value. It also might not validate using W3C validator anymore (not tested).
rel="something" should only be used on <link> elements, with the exception of rel="noopener", rel="nofollow" or rel="noreferrer" on anchors (<a> tags).
Note - There may be other rel="" for hyperlinks but the two stated are the only ones I can think of, it is no longer valid to use it for page locations, bookmarks etc.
Update
Thanks to #Sean who pointed out in the comments other elements can accept rel="", however MicroFormats are not the preferred way of adding structured data according to Google and their development is not as full fledged as using https://schema.org and JSON+LD.
“We currently prefer JSON-LD markup. I think most of the new
structured data come out for JSON-LD first. So that’s
what we prefer.” - John Mueller
I am obviously incorrect in what I said as it is perfectly valid, however personally I would not bother and stick with what Google prefers apart from the few items I listed.
See #Sean's answer for a bit more info on the subject.
for clarity rel="" has no bearing on accessibility
home isn't one of the allowed keywords explicitly defined by the current HTML spec as allowed values for the rel attribute. However, the spec goes on to state that:
Types defined as extensions in the microformats wiki existing-rel-values page with the status "proposed" or "ratified" may be used with the rel attribute on link, a, and area elements in accordance to the "Effect on..." field.
On that microformats page, home has the "proposed" status—so it is valid to use according to the spec.
There's a specific rel-home page within that microformats site that goes into more detail about the usage with examples. It makes the statement—
Opera browser supports rel="home"
—which would imply that Opera has some functionality tied to that usage, but it doesn't provide any additional details.
Summary: rel="home" is valid to use on a elements. It's benefits aren't clear, but it doesn't hurt to use it. The draft spec for it has been around since 2005, so there's bound to be some technologies that make use of it.
What namespace/scheme/whatever does this "vr:canonical" come from?
<meta property="vr:canonical" content="URL_FROM_OTHER_PAGE" />
(edit: I know canonical links, just curious about that "vr:" thing)
After analyzing the page (and the code of its used trackers and counters and advertising scripts), this seems to be a property used by an advertising tool named "VisualRevenue", a product by the Company Outbrain.
Thanks for your effort.
For example:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://moz.com/blog" />
This would tell Google that the page in question should be treated as though it were a copy of the URL above and that all of the link & content metrics the engines apply should technically flow back to that URL.
The Canonical URL tag attribute is similar in many ways to a 301 redirect from an SEO perspective. In essence, you're telling the engines that multiple pages should be considered as one (which a 301 does), without actually redirecting visitors to the new URL
Google don't like it when you use same content across multiple sites, according to some.
Is there any way to annotate/tag a block of content with the "source".
Something like an attribute:
<div original-content="http://some.url">
The purpose is solely to let Google that we have duplicated the content (I.e. not as part of a search ranking strategy). Search engines could then use this information somehow.
This might help you out:
http://searchengineland.com/google-creates-metatags-to-help-id-original-news-sources-56115
Looks like the meta tag you want is
meta name=”original-source” content=”[url]”
However it looks like that is only for an entire page.
Use the canonical tag, which tells the web engine crawler that the text is duplicated from the original website.
Example:
Place this in the header of your HTML page (in the duplicated content page)
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.original-website.com" />
Reference: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
No, HTML has no such element or attribute.
If you quote the content (in a q or blockuote element), you could use the cite attribute. But you must not use these elements for anything other than quotes.
If the whole document is duplicated (or is a subset), you could use the canonical link type. But you must not use this if only part of the document is duplicated while the other parts are different.
Today I came across a <link rel="image_src"> tag. I don't know about it, so I use google. Google tell me that this tag are similar to og:image. So I came to open graph main site to read about it http://ogp.me/, but i found nothing about link rel="image_src". So this tag is replacement to meta property="og:image" or is in special tag in another specification ? How use this tag or for what is used?
The rel attribute specifies the type of the link, i.e. the kind of the relationship between the document and the linked resource. Usually just a few keywords, like stylesheet and icon, are used. Although many other keywords have been proposed and registered, most of them are write-only: they are meant to express something, but nobody cares (no software uses the information).
The extension mechanisms of HTML5 include, in the description of link types, a somewhat obscure mechanism that allows, in theory, anyone register his favorite keyword in the existing rel values wiki to make documents using it as rel value “conforming”.
And image_src has indeed been registered there, with the information that it is used to “specify a Webpage Icon for use by Facebook, Yahoo, Digg, etc.”, no specification has been identified but an article about it is linked to, and it is “probably redundant with rel=icon”.
You can use this tag to use an image as the thumb for link share.
When someone posts a link to your site on social media, such as Facebook, the image that is displayed with your link is usually the first one in your code. This may not be the image that best fits defines your site, and it may not fit well in the small box that Facebook posts. The link rel="image_src" tag lets you control what image (or images, you can have more than one by stacking separate references) is displayed alongside your link.
I want to add canonical links to my pages, but do I need to specify the domain, or will a relative URL do?
In other words, is:
<link rel="canonical" href="/item/1">
good enough, or do I need to use:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://mydomain.com/item/1">
Directly from Google:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Can the link be relative or absolute?
rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
Again, Google says this:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
Avoid errors: use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the rel="canonical" link element.
Use this structure: https://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendresss.html
Not this structure: /dresses/green/greendress.html).
For example’s sake, these are their URLs:
http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/
http://example.com/wordpress/seo/seo-plugin/
This is what rel=canonical was invented for. Especially in a lot of e-commerce systems, this (unfortunately) happens fairly often, where a product has several different URLs depending on how you got there. You would apply rel=canonical in the following method:
You pick one of your two pages as the canonical version. It should be the version you think is the most important one. If you don’t care, pick the one with the most links or visitors. If all of that’s equal: flip a coin. You need to choose.
Add a rel=canonical link from the non-canonical page to the canonical one. So if we picked the shortest URL as our canonical URL, the other URL would link to the shortest URL like so in the <head> section of the page:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/">
That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
All href attributes are hypertext references - that's what it stands for. As such, they are always URI-References, not URIs, and can be relative.
In this case though, there's a benefit in putting in the full URI if you can, because it will survive anything that migrates it onto another domain in the future (assuming you will still want the domain listed to be the canonical one), and can even survive some of the cruder automated plagiarisms :)
That benefit is pretty slight if you aren't actively using non-canonical versions on other domains though, so I wouldn't expend much effort on it.
There is nothing special about canonical. It’s a standard link type, for use with standard ways to provide links (e.g., the link element), so you can specify any kind of URL reference (absolute, relative, protocol-relative, in combination with the base element, empty, …).
RFC 6596 (The Canonical Link Relation) explicitly says:
The target (canonical) IRI MAY:
Specify a relative IRI (see [RFC3986], Section 4.2).
One of the examples:
[…] or as a relative IRI:
<link rel="canonical" href="page.php?item=purse">
Update on canonical best practices: rel="canonical" has cross-domain support. Google's source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Moreover, the introduction of structured data makes the use of canonicals even more strict, as Google will not pick-up the JSON markup from not canonical sources (a mistake I happen to have made!).
Relative canonical paths are accepted. This one works best:
<link rel="canonical" href="#"/>
It points to the current document's URL – including queries – sans the hash part.
If you only have one domain for that website, is ok to use the absolute path:
<link rel="canonical" href="/item/1">