Canonical URL Tag Usage
-
Hi there,
I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page?
Kind Regards
-
I will do Hannah, thanks again.
-
Hey,
Re the rel-canonical, Bing say they don't like that implementation, but Google are fine with it. My advice? Yep - do it
Thanks
Hannah
PS If you want to ask a new question it's best to start a new thread - more likely to get seen & answered
-
Hi Hannah,
Just one more question please.
If I had just one website, would you always advice in using a canonical tag for every webpage on that site?
So, http://www.example.com/product-page/ would have canonical tag
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product-page/" />
-
Thanks Hannah for all your help, I will let you know how it goes.
Kind Regards
-
Yep - you need to place the tags on every page which is duplicated across both sites
-
AH! at the moment I only have one hreflang on each domain
.co.uk website has:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IE" href="http://www.mywebsite.ie" />
and .ie website has:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk" />
Was I doing it wrong to start with?
-
Like the rel="alternate" tag you need to put the canonical tag on every page of your .ie site pointing to the relevant page on your .co.uk site. You should also put the canonical tag on the .co.uk site pointing to itself - e.g.:
So on http://yourdomain.co.uk/page-whatever you'd need:
http://yourdomain.ie/page-whatever; />
http://yourdomain.ie/page-whatever - you'd need:
-
Hi Hannah,
Thanks for your feedback.
This is very interesting indeed Hannah, so this means that the .ie version will fall away in SERPs?
Technical question: Do I put the canonical tag on the .ie website pointing to the .co.uk website?
rel="canonical" href="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk"/>
Do I put a canonical tag on the .co.uk website?
Appreciate your help.
-
Hi Gary,
I think on this occasion you ought to use both rel="alternate" and the canonical tag.
One of my colleagues had a conversation with a Googler which supports and explains this further:
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
Yes, everything is correct in Google webmaster tools. I have a feeling even though this is correct in webmaster tools that Google is counting as duplicate.
-
What are Google Webmaster Tools telling you? Have you used it to tell Google your site is geotargeted?
-
Hi Highland,
Thanks for your reply.
Do you know what is happening with this then? as it has no PR anymore plus it's not in the index
-
In this case, no. Matt Cutts has stated that country TLDs that are duplicate are not generally seen as duplicate by Google.
-
Hi Stefan,
Yes, in Google webmaster tools that countries are set, however one of the keywords I was ranking well for has disappeared from the .co.uk results, when I paste the first paragraph of the .co.uk page in question into .co.uk, its the .ie website that appears, I have also put this on the .co.uk & .ie webpages in question:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IE" href="mysite.ie" />
<link < span="">rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="mysite.co.uk" /></link <>
I put the above code about 10 days ago, but still not sorted the problem, I feel that I need to tell Google that the .co.uk website is the original, what do you think?
-
Hello Gary,
You can use the
hreflang="'en-IE" href="www.your-ie.site"> element
For more information see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
You can also in Google webmaster tools set the country a specific domain is targeting.
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
-
Canonical for multi store
Hello all, I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags; UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/ Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag? ie; UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/ (please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
Good day to you Mozers, I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced. This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified. Examples are: Every PoS could have a different price on their product Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change. I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag. i.e: https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential. Question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one. I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on? I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted. Thank you in advance,1 -
Can multiple geotargeting hreflang tags be set in one URL? International SEO question
Hi All, Thank you for this great post! I have a question please. If i target www.onedirect.co.nl/en/ in English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are the tags below correct? English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg: http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-be" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-lu" /> AND Targeting Holland and Belgium in Dutch: Pour la page www.onedirect.co.nl on peut inclure ce tag: http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-be" /> thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onedirect_uk0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Canonical Issue with urls
I saw some urls of my site showing duplicate page content, duplicate page title issues on crawl reports. So I have set canonical url for every urls , that has dupicate content / page title. But still SeoMoz crawl test is showing issue. I am giving here one url with issue. The below given urls shown duplicate content and duplicate page title with some other urls all are given below. Checked URL http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7635 dup page content http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 dup page Title http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 But I have set canonical url for all these urls already , that is :- http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 This should actually solve the problem right ? Search engine should identify the canonical url as original url and only should consider that. Thanks0 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
Tagged URL ranking organically
I've noticed that one of our GA tagged urls are ranking organically & therefore is skewing the referral data. The campaign that we were tracking is no longer active but the link still works, but it's going to an old landing page. I asked our developers if we could redirect it but they said that it didn't work. Does anyone have some advise or a solution for this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Elihn0 -
Google Author Biography Tag-Why Should I Pay Attention To The Author Biography Tag
Hello, I've reading all about Google's Author Biography tag but I am not sure how I can use this in my business. Can anyone explain ( in plain simple English) how I can leverage this tag? Is there any implications in SEO and higher rankings? Just trying to wrap my head around this concept and why it's important...or not. Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0