This is a great question. Should you put canonicalization tag on every single page?

Well, there’s a short-term and long-term answer.

1. 1. Short-term answer is that I would probably say, not right now. Take a little bit of time, study your site architecture, and think about URL normalization, beautification, whatever you want to call it.

Think about the structure of URLs that you want to have and take a few weeks or even a few months to sort of asses where you want to go. I don’t think that you should just throw canonicalization tag wherever on every single page of your site, immediately and just start moving it around. It is a powerful tool and people do have the ability to sort of shoot themselves in the foot. On the plus side, we’ve seen a quarter of a million pages show up within a just a few days, when using this canonicalization tag; which is great. It’s good to see the attraction and adoption move very quickly. On the downside, we have seen one company, very large company, a computer company, I won’t call them up by name; where they had a homepage and their homepage was doing a redirect. They also had a canonical tag and the canonical tag pointed to a page that we haven’t crawled at all. Those sorts of cases can be very difficult to try and do the right thing. We do the right thing, but it can take us a couple of days to sort of sort out, and go and find that URL and crawl it. So, I wouldn’t just jump in deep in the pool without doing some planning.

The long-term answer is, it doesn’t hurt to have this on every single page of your site. Ideally, you’d find other ways to solve canonicalization, but it doesn’t hurt to sort of say on every page ‘This page maps to this canonicalized, very pretty, very preferred version of this URL’. What you want to do is to really make sure that it’s absolute URLs, ideally goes in one hop, it’s a logical system that you’ve designed – you haven’t just jumped in and started to play around with. I don’t see any harm in having that sort of thing because we’ll just follow those, what we almost think of as mini 301 redirects within that site, and we’ll try to canonicalize according to those suggestions. We don’t guarantee that we’ll do it, but it should work just fine without any problems. So, feel free to do that, but take some time and plan it out a little bit.

Related posts:

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5. What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.