Canonical Links in Pro Version? | CyberSEO Pro | Support Forum

I don't think it's a good idea to use it, actually. If you set a canonical link to the original article, your page won't be indexed by Google at all. So I've just removed that option.

Could you please tell me why do you need this option?

No, you've got it wrong. Your pages really need to have a proper canonical tag, which refers to themselves. All your posts and pages have a proper canonical link by default. Just open the HTML source of any post at your site and search for "canonical". It will be there. It will be a proper one and you don't have to do anything to add it. WordPress does all the jobs for.

The option you are asking about was replacing your proper canonical links to the original article source. I don't know why but some people asked me about it. However, as it was written in the manual, you should never enable that option, because your pages with it just won't be indexed by search engines. Once again, I don't know why some people wanted to do it, but it's definitely not something you should do.

In shot, it was something I'd call "anti-canonical", because it doesn't help with SEO. It just ruins it. The proper canonical link in your posts tells Google that your page is original (even if it was imported from somewhere). What that option was enabled, the canonical link in your posts was telling Google: "look, that's not a my article. I've just imported it from this URL". Why would you want to do so?

Maybe they were using it to promote their original blog via satellite ones. E.g. you have one blog with unique articles and 10 satellite blogs that import the same articles but refer to the original site as a primary content source in order to improve its (not their own) SEO. Anyway, it's not something you should do if you don't have some secret plan...

The duplicated content may always hurt your SEO only because it's not original, but the proper canonical link won't hurt it for sure.