Canonical Tag Uses Source Title and Meta Data?
-
When optimising a regional same language micro site within a sub folder of a .com it dawned on me that our use of the hreflang and canonical meta elements will render individual elements such as H1 and title obsolete.
As a canonical tag takes the canonical source title and meta right?
It would still have value in optimising localised headings though?
Appreciate any thoughts, suggestions (o:
-
This is a really complex topic and a special case of the canonical tag.. It also doesn't help that Google keeps adjusting their advice. See this thread:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
"When Google discovers a cluster of pages with a single canonical URL, our algorithms will use the title and snippet from the canonical version in our search results. Therefore, it's a good idea not to include region-specific content in the title and meta description tags of the canonical URL. For example, use "Example Widget Inc" instead of "Example Widget USA Inc" or "Example Widget UK"."
So, what about the non-canonical pages? Well, the implication is that, if you use hreflang AND canonical, you'll avoid dupe content problems but the proper pages may rank in the proper regions, even with the canonical tag. In that case, you'd want to include regional variations in the non-canonical META data (for regional searchers). Unfortunately, I haven't seen good data on this yet.
Like Istvan, my gut reaction is to try hreflang first, without the canonical, IF you're not having duplicate content issues or seeing regional variations cross over into inappropriate regions. If you are seeing that, then you'll probably need both.
-
Use only the Hreflang instead of hrefland+canonical combo.
-
This is what we have done, as there are multiple languages and multiple countries.
We are going to use HREFLANG and Canonical, but doesn't this combination mean that titles and meta description from the canonical url is used on each of the duplicated regional sites?
-
Ok,
let's say example.com/us/ is targeted to US and example.com/uk/ is targeted to UK.
If you put a canonical on both that targets to other one, one of them will disappear from Google Index.
What you can do is use only the HREFLANG attribute. And use that to target en-US and en-GB as languages. Maybe that can boost it a little-bit.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
-
I understand what both do, but thanks for the clarification.
I am wondering if when using the canonical to group same language micro-sites say English American and UK the heading elements are localised say:
English title / meta contains : "specialist organisation"
English American title / meta contains: "specialty organization"
Would the cannonical source (the american version) be shown to a UK audience?
Just pondering is all, thanks again Istvan.
-
Hi Wvicary,
I think you miss-understood the canonical tag usage.
After applying the canonical to a page you choose which version of the page will be included in the search index.
For example: you have:
if in the index file you insert the canonical tag, which points to example.com then example.com/index.html will be excluded from the search results.
now HREFLANG: what id does is creates a connection between same content in different languages. For example you have the domain: www.example.com and have three main languages: EN, NL and DE. and you choose to have three different sub-folders for each:
inserting in the header the HREFLANG attribute will help the secondary languages gain reputation and not for localization.
Read through John Doherty's article. He tested quite well the HREFLANG.
Here is the article: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/hreflang-markup-testing/
I hope this helped,
Istvan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel-canonical vs Href-lang use for an international website.
I have a multi-country website that uses country subfolders to separate countries. When I run a Moz scan, I am getting canonical related alerts (this is probably related to some of our US content being duplicated on the other country websites). Shouldn't I be using href-lang instead since I am telling search engines that a certain article in country B, is just a copy of the same article in country A?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marshdigitalmarketing0 -
Canonical Tags increased after putting the appropriate tag?
Hey, I noticed that the number of duplicate title tags increased from 14k to 30k in Google Search Console. These dup title tags derived from having the incorrect canonical tags. For instance, http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul562
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens These two are the same exact pages with two parameters (These are not unisex by the way). Anyway, when I viewed the page source, it had the parameter in the canonical tag so.... it would look like this So whether it be http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens The canonical tag had the "?d=Womens" I figured that wasn't best practices, so for the canonical tag I removed the parameter so now the canonical tag is http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/ for that specific page with parameter (if that makes sense). My question is, why did my number of errors doubled after what I thought fixed the solution?0 -
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags after I changes the permalinks structure in wordpress. It there a quick fix for this and how damaging is the above for seo. Thanks T
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0 -
Tags: 301 Redirect, Rel Canonical, or Leave Them Alone?
The title is pretty self explanatory ... we have cornerstone pages ( such as a page for "Widget A") that rank for a certain keyword and then relevant articles that all link to that particular cornerstone page. Each of those articles has the same tag ("Widget A") to tie them together. If you click on that tag, it creates a list of all articles with that tag. We think that this may be siphoning off some of that keyword Google Juice from our Widget A cornerstone page. Our question is, should we 301 redirect that tag to point to the Widget A cornerstone page, use a rel canonical pointing to the Widget A cornerstone page, or just leave it alone like we are doing now? Our goal is to have the Widget A cornerstone page receive the most Google Juice possible and not be diminished by the tags. Note* - We don't want to stop Google from crawling the tags because some of our tags rank highly for other keywords. Also, we tried 301 redirecting the tags before and our ranking dropped significantly ... however, we made a lot of site changes at the same time so we are not sure if the drop in rank was due to redirecting the tags or the site changes. Help please ... thanks in advance 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Humanovation0 -
Block in robots.txt instead of using canonical?
When I use a canonical tag for pages that are variations of the same page, it basically means that I don't want Google to index this page. But at the same time, spiders will go ahead and crawl the page. Isn't this a waste of my crawl budget? Wouldn't it be better to just disallow the page in robots.txt and let Google focus on crawling the pages that I do want indexed? In other words, why should I ever use rel=canonical as opposed to simply disallowing in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Does it matter if the meta description and meta keywords come before the title tag in the
The way our site was built, engineers put the title tag blow the meta desc. and meta keywords. I asked to have it changed based on the best practice of putting the most important content first, but apparently doing this will cause a major ripple effect in the way the site was engineered. Will we lose out on full SEO benefit with this structure? Should I stand down? <title></p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vacatia_SEO0 -
Homepage not showing up in Google even when searching exact title tag
why does my site not show up in Google even when you search exact homepage title tag or business name (Brand-It Web Design)? You can even search the exact title tag for my site and it does not show up. If you search site:branditwebdesign.com you will see that it is there. But just the homepage doesn't show up in search for anything else. We have probably tried everything in the world to get this working. Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brand_It_Web_Design0 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0