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Will setting the rel=”canonical” attribute of a page to itself cause a loop?

Will setting the rel=”canonical” attribute of a page to itself cause a loop? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

MATT CUTTS: Today’s question comes from Mark James writing in from the UK. Mark asks, hi Matt, with canonical tags, can you point that page to itself? So if www.google.com/webpage points to www.google.com/webpage will this cause a loop? Great question. The answer is even if it does cause a loop, it doesn’t cause a problem in Google. We specifically thought about, well what about if you have a rel canonical page looping back to itself whenever we were building and writing the code for the rel canonical tag attribute in Google and we built in support to make sure that that doesn’t cause any sort of problem. So I can’t speak for other search engines, but it’s definitely a very common case. Imagine if you had to check every single URL and then do a self check to see whether you were on that URL. If you were then you couldn’t have a rel canonical tage. That would be a lot of work to generate all those tage. So for our part, we said you know what? Go ahead and you can put a rel canonical on every single page on your site if you want to. And then if it points back to itself, that’s no problem at all. We handle that just fine. Thanks for asking.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: