Non-Canonical Pages still Indexed. Is this normal?
-
I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes. So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's. Problem is this has not quite worked. I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago.
This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them. Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why?
I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job. Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's. In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work.
Examples Below-
Old Pages:
www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235
New Pages:
www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name
Canonical tag on both pages:
rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.
-
It can take a while. I disagree very slightly with Alan and EGOL on one point - while 301s are traditionally more appropriate here, I often find that canonicals are pretty strong (and more than a hint). Both suffer the same problem, though - the signal has to be crawled and processed, and that doesn't always take right away. I haven't seen any reports on it taking 2, 3, etc. times to happen, but I've definitely seen a page re-cache without the indexation signals beign honored.
Are these true duplicates or did something change in the interim a bit? If the duplicates don't seem like true duplicates or you put 1000s of them out there all at once, Google could choose to ignore the canonicals.
If these really seem stuck, though, switching to 301s is harmless, and for a permanent URL change, it is probably the better way to go. I wouldn't expect that to kick in instantly either, though.
-
Yes... I agree with Alan. Canonical is a hint.
We put rel=canonical on about 250 pages in early February. As of today about 1/2 of those pages are still in the SERPs. The numbers are falling but this is really really slow to implement.
If you have done everything correctly it will probably work but requires patience.
-
Alan, I appreciate the help. I will go with this and see what happens and try to find those videos. Graci.
-
Matt cutts has said it a few times in videos, i could not tell you what ones without doing a far bit of searching.
-
Yes they should, but 301's and canonicals leak link juice, so you want your links to go directly to the correct page where you can.
See half way down this page, you will see just how easy it is to do all this, with a few clicks.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development
for you it may not be quiest as easy as you are converting from id to product name, but if you look into the url rewrite module a bit further you will see it is posible to do this once for all pages
-
Also do you know of any documentation that states that it takes a few passes for a canonical tag to be honored and also for 301's as well? That would really help me explain my initial thoughts on using the canonical tag.
-
I get the part about the 301's and I believe we have iis7 but between departments, just not as simple of a change especially regarding the number of products I have to do this for, 800+.
Regarding the links to the old URL, it was my belief that with the canonical tag, that weight should transfer over to the the new URL as well or was I mistaken on that?
-
You seem to have done everything ok, but from my understanding google does not honer 301's or caninicals first crawl, they wait a few times to make sure its not a mistake.
What sort of server are you using? if you are using windows with iis7 is is very easy to impliment the urlrewites and corasponding 301's
i would 301, a canonical is a hint, a301 is a directive. and also if people stil go to your old pages, they may make a link to the old page rather then the new url.
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
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Worth redirecting non-www to www due to higher page authority with www?
When checking my domain I receive higher page authority for www vs non-www. I am considering moving to the www url and applying the necessary redirections but wanted to quickly check if this is worth it. The root page authority https://www.diveidc.com : PA 40 https://diveidc.com : PA 35 By redirecting would I just be transferring over negative signals to the www domain, thus voiding the point for doing any redirect at all?
Technical SEO | | MAGNUMCreative0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Unnecessary pages getting indexed in Google for my blog
I have a blog dapazze.com and I am suffering from a problem for a long time. I found out that Google have indexed hundreds of replytocom links and images attachment pages for my blog. I had to remove these pages manually using the URL removal tool. I had used "Disallow: ?replytocom" in my robots.txt, but Google disobeyed it. After that, I removed the parameter from my blog completely using the SEO by Yoast plugin. But now I see that Google has again started indexing these links even after they are not present in my blog (I use #comment). Google have also indexed many of my admin and plugin pages, whereas they are disallowed in my robots.txt file. Have a look at my robots.txt file here: http://dapazze.com/robots.txt Please help me out to solve this problem permanently?
Technical SEO | | rahulchowdhury0 -
Will rel=canonical cause a page to be indexed?
Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content: One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.) http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
Technical SEO | | jgower0 -
What is the best method for indexing blog pages?
I have a client whose blog has hundreds if not thousands of entries. My question is does it help his site if each unique blog entry becomes indexed on Google? Can we do this dynamically? And role does the canonical tag play in blog entries if at all? Thanks, Chris
Technical SEO | | coxen000 -
Why is Google only indexing 3 of 8 pages?
Hi everyone, I have a small 8 page website I launched about 6 months ago. For the life of me I can not figure out why google is only indexing 3 of the 8 pages. The pages are not duplicate content in any way. I have good internal linking structure. At this time I dont have many inbound links from others, that will come in time. Am I missing something here? Can someone give me a clue? Thanks Tim Site: www.jparizonaweddingvideos.com
Technical SEO | | fasctimseo0 -
Google News not indexing .index.html pages
Hi all, we've been asked by a blog to help them better indexing and ranking on Google News (with the site being already included in Google News with poor results) The blog had a chronicle URL duplication problem with each post existing with 3 different URLs: #1) www.domain.com/post.html (currently in noindex for editorial choices as showing all the comments) #2) www.domain.com/post/index.html (currently indexed showing only top comments) #3) www.domain.com/post/ (very same as #2) We've chosen URL #2 (/index.html) as canonical URL, and included a rel=canonical tag on URL #3 (/) linking to URL #2.
Technical SEO | | H-FARM
Also we've submitted yesterday a Google News sitemap including consistently the list of URLs #2 from the last 48h . The sitemap has been properly "digested" by Google and shows that all URLs have been sent and indexed. However if we use the site:domain.com command on Google News we see something completely different: Google News has indexed actually only some news and more specifically only the URLs #3 type (ending with the trailing slash instead of /index.html). Why ? What's wrong ? a) Does Google News bot have problems indexing URLs ending with .index.html ? While figuring out what's wrong we've found out that http://news.google.it/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=inurl%3Aindex.html gives no results...it seems that Google News index overall does not include any URLs ending with /index.html b) Does Google News bot recognise rel=canonical tag ? c) Is it just a matter of time and then Google News will pick up the right URLs (/index.html) and/or shall we communicate Google News team any changes ? d) Any suggestions ? OR Shall we do the other way around. meaning make URL #3 the canonical one ? While Google News is showing these problems, Google Web search has actually well received the changes, so we don't know what to do. Thanks for your help, Matteo0