I noticed some pages don't have canonical tags. For example:

• /gallery/

• /files/

• /privacy/

• /guidelines/

• /contact/

• /blog/

I'm sure there are others. I suggest adding canonical tags for those pages.

Canonical... to where?

7 minutes ago, Matt said:

Canonical... to where?

To your preferred URL, of course. Canonical tags are considered best practice, even if no other version of that page exists. And since almost all other pages contain a canonical reference, I think it just makes sense to include these.

You don't need to add canonical tags to point to the page you're on. You need them to help Google understand faceted pages.

I don't completely agree with that. If you don't have a canonical tag, Google will try to determine if another page with similar content is a more authoritative version.

Example:

You place a gallery feed widget on your home page. Google then looks at your /gallery/ page and sees very similar content on your home page and decides the home page is authoritative. Because of this, your /gallery/ page isn't indexed.

Or what about /gallery/ vs /gallery (no trailing slash)?

The GSC lists canonical data for every page, indicating that this is an important factor in their algorithm. This is for my /gallery/ page:

I'm not claiming to have problems because a few pages don't have this tag. I also understand that Google can ignore it and choose a different page. But it is considered best practice, and Google recommends that all pages have a canonical tag.