Canonical tag removal

[Frankdigital]

Hi Guys,

My new client has a canonical tag for every blog that will give more juices to the url/blogs/news (screenshot below)

This is not the right way to improve blog traffic for SEO (as the majority of the juices will go to the page /blogs/news). I want to remove that tag.

Would love to understand the main consequences, am I going to have loads of redirects, 404s? Would you recommend me to take another action?

Thanks in advance for your support.

Best regards, 

Francesco

[KieranR]

Yeah that's dumb. Just set it back to default.

Unless there's some missing context here? Otherwise that setup is just saying, for each blog post: "this blog post is not important, it's just a duplicate of the /blogs/news page". Which makes no sense to me.

I'd say it's likely ignoring those canonicals anyway seeing as they are being used incorrectly with a rule like that seeing as the content on the destination/endpoint canonicals is not similar at all.

[Frankdigital]

Hi Kieran,

Thanks for your message. 

Totally agree with your point. My last question is: If I delete that line of code (canonical to blogs) what kind of impact will have?

I believe nothing will happen but want to double-check first.

Best regards, 

Francesco

[KieranR · Accepted solution]

I wouldn't anticipate much of an impact at all, because if my guess is correct Google will be ignoring those canonicals anyway.

But I would keep an eye on clicks or landing sessions to /news/blog (if there is any) and also segment out all blog posts and keep an eye on their clicks, impressions, positions etc.

[Frankdigital]

Thanks, Kieran, 

Really appreciated your recommendations.

Will apply those changes and monitor the performance. 

Best regards, 

Francesco

[Beppe2]

Same for me, i own https://jdm-best.com/ and i have some pages that are tagged canonical (including a collection page) where i don't wan't to and i have no clue about what to do...