What happens if the Canonical URL is the same as the actual page URL?

Question

I might be asking a trivial question here, but how do the search engines treat loops created via rel="canonical" tag?

My scenario is that being a site having dynamic content, I have URLs as follows:

http://mysite.com/mynews.htm
http://mysite.com/mynews.htm?param=1
http://mysite.com/mynews.htm?param2=3
... etc

Now, I add a canonical tag to the JSP rendering all the above 3 URLs such that all of them will have the same canonical URL:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.com/mynews.htm" />

Now, the canonical URL is fine for URLs 2 & 3 but is exactly the same as URL 1. How will the various search engines respond to this scenario, as this will create "infinite loops"?

Hope to get a reply soon. Thanks.

Answer 1

Redundancy is ok as it just means that URL is the canonical URL so it can safely be ignored on that page. There is no infinite loop if you do this.