Different versions of a page, whether on your own site

[zihadhasan019]

On partner sites, or places you're licensing content (note: this is an update Google launched on Dec. 17th, 2009) can all reference back to the original to help tell the search engines where to find that piece. However, it's also perfectly OK to do this: rel canonical self reference Looking through Google's blog post on the subject, this isn't explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out.


You can also see Googler Maile Ohye answerin email database uk g a comment on this: @Wade: Yes, it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won't harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you. Maile's got really good advice here. If you run into situations where third parties are referencing your posts and appending strings of data to the URL, it can be really helpful to have the canonical URL tag on these by default.


In fact, we've worked with many companies recently who found it helpful to employ sitewide as a best practice, just to prevent future iterations or less SEO savvy development from reproducing versions of the page that didn't contain the rel=canonical and potentially losing link juice / causing canonicalization issues. One last piece - it's a really, really good way to make sure Google indexes the http rather than https version of your page (and counts link juice to the proper one).