: What is the SEO impact of canonical links pointing to 404 pages? A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of

@Michele947

Essentially, the canonical url tag would be telling search engines that the definitive url that you want to rank is the one that triggers a 404.

When crawlers follow this canonical url tag, and see the 404 status, they're going to go away and maybe come back again later (as the 404 is just 'temporary' rather than a 410 'gone'), but the lack of any quality content on the 404 page will eventually see the canonical url depreciated in search results.

I'd recommend that you really sort out the canonical > 404 issue, either by choosing a different canonical url (one that exists), or by creating the missing page.

If your actual goal is to get rid of a page, then use the 410 'Gone' status rather than the 404, and don't bother to point a canonical at it.

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@Sue5673885

Consider example.com/abc and example.com/us/xyz. Both pages are same with exact duplicate content. In case you want /us/xyz to rank in SERPs.

Google Webmaster Tools recommends 301 redirection of /abc to /us/xyz to avoid duplication penalty or ranking drop.

In some cases 301 redirection is not possible due to technical limitations. Then Google advises to place rel canonical tag - <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/us/xyz”/> in the source code of example.com/abc. This way you intimate the bots that example.com/us/xyz is the actual page that needs to rank. example.com/abc will still be crawled but the link juice and authority moves to example.com/us/xyz and it will start ranking for relevant results based on your site Authority.

In case you place an incorrect URl in canonical tag, both pages will lose on visibility on SERPs. In some case it will still show /abc if the page authority is very high against the query searched by user. But your competitor is surely going to gain from it.

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