Should large corporations use rel=canonical?

Terry Cox from Orlando, Florida asks “In regards to the new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?

So this is a great question, should you put the canonical tag on every single page, well there is a short term answer and a long term answer. Short term answer is I would probably say not right now, take a little bit of time, study your site architecture, think about URL normalization, beautification, whatever you want to call it think about the structure of URLs you want to have and take a few weeks or few months or couple of months you sort of assess where you want to go. I don’t think you should throw the canonical tag on every single page on your site immediately and move it around, because it is a powerful tool and people do have the ability to shoot themselves on their foot. So on the plus side we’ve seen a quarter of a million pages show up within just a few days, where people are using this canonicalization tag, which is fantastic. It is good to see the traction and the adoption move very quickly. On the down side we have seen one company, very large company, computer company, I won’t call them out by name, where they had a home page and the home page was doing a redirect and they also had a canonical tag and the canonical tag pointed to a page that we hadn’t crawled at all and so those sort of cases can be very difficult to try to do the right thing, and we do the right thing. But it can take us a couple of days to sort it out or go and find that URL and crawl it. So I wouldn’t just jump in deep in the pool without doing some planning. The longer term answer is that it doesn’t hurt to have this on every single page of your site. Ideally you’d find other ways to solve the canonicalization but it doesn’t hurt to say on every single page this page maps to this canonicalized, very pretty, very preferred version of this URL. But what you want to do is, you want to make sure that, it is absolute URLs, ideally goes in one hub, it’s a logical system that you designed you haven’t just jumped out and started playing 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 is many 301 redirects within that site and we’ll try to canonicalize according to those suggestion. We don’t guarantee that we’ll do it but it should work just fine with no problems. So feel free to do that but take some time and plan it out a little bit.

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