Help with Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
-
Whenever i enable Canonical URL through the 3DCart Control panel I get this Critical Factor error when running the on page report card:
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Moderate fix
<dl>
<dt>Canonical URL</dt>
<dd>"http://rcnitroshop.com/Nitro-Monster-Truck"</dd>
<dt>Explanation</dt>
<dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd>
</dl>
Now if I disable Canonical URL then run the on page report card again the critical error goes away but I get this Optional Factor error instead:
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Moderate fix
<dl>
<dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt>
<dd>0</dd>
<dt>Explanation</dt>
<dd>Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.</dd>
</dl>
So basically I disabled it because obviously a Critical error is much worse then an optional error. Is there a way I can get rid of both errors?
-
We are a creative design and development agency as well as a search marketing agency, we can build and develop ecommerce websites and look after all migration, hosting and configuration - we can manage everything basically. We are based in the UK though so unsure if you are looking for someone a bit nearer to you.
I also appreciate that it's not really a recommendation if we are pushing our own services to you so if I were to recommend another company that I have no affiliation with, in terms of anything Magento related, Inchoo would be my recommendation.
-
It will not let me change that part. I wish I could. It would look a lot better.
I didn't really think about hiring someone to do it. Is there anyone you would recommend talking to about doing something like that (Switching over to Magento).
-
Glad you identified the setting, thought it looked something like that.
Site is looking a little better, is there any way you can change the layout of the product pages, perhaps putting the price and options alongside the image gallery or anything similar to that? Any kind of layout options available from the admin panel?
Appreciate your decision to stick it out with 3dCart for now, can sometimes prove a daunting task migrating to a new ecommerce provider - it should be a relatively smooth transition if you hire the right person/company if you decide to do so in the future though.
Happy to advise on your current site as required based on what the platform will allow you to do though.
-
Well in 3DCarts control panel I noticed that in Settings>Store Settings all the way at the bottom it says Store URL : The URL was "rcnitroshop.com". I just added "www." in front of that. BTW after listening to what you told me about my website I did some redesigning if you want to check it out. I added a phone number at the top, decreased white space, added some images on the sidebars to gain some trust, overall I feel I made the site a little more trustworthy and hopefully will be a little more efficient. I'm just going to stick with 3DCart for a little while until I feel like putting a week into switch all of my products over. I will just try to make the best of it for now lol. Still got a lot of work to do though.
From You:
Conversions
- Design is not fluid.
- Too much whitespace.
- Everything just appears in one wide column, needs to be split into easily digestible sections with call to actions.
- There is nothing catching my attention and no existing call to actions.
- Ask yourself - Why should people buy from you?
-
No problem Bill, glad you sorted it - what was the cause in the end?
-
I figured it out. Thanks for the response!
-
Potentially an issue with 3dCart's canonical URL feature?
I think there is potentially a bigger issue with your site / URL structure causing this maybe. Have you recently changed whether your website makes use of www / non www in the URL's? Instances of both versions are indexed in Google currently - did you enter the canonical URL in 3dCart with the www or without. And if you use Google Webmaster Tools, is this set to display URL's with or without the www?
There is currently a www redirect from non www to www however, so one would presume www is preferred - so just ensure any settings in 3dCart's admin panel that include your domain, are inserted with the www included.
Maybe on this page.
Hope this helps initially.
-
Someone has had to run into this before : /
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
-
Value of using spaces or no spaces on product category page varient keywords
Hello, all fellow Mozzers,
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDavison
I have taken over a project and this account, so can't change the username according to MOZ.🙃 We run an eCommerce website, and to me, some of the content is conflicting as some pages have more information content than what I would put in a commerce page, but this is how the boss wants it to work, personally, I would separate the content out.
The page I'm working on:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/205-70-14.html
and this is an example of the rest of these types of pages, I will be tackling:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/125-15.html I was tasked to improve SEO ranking, when using the MOZ page grader I had a score of 24 out of 27 83% SEO score and 3-page problems. 7th position in Google for the search term 205/70 R14 As it is a generic product listing page, It was pointless to add to the URL and the Internal links I can't reduce as these are links to products, so I went to reduce the
keyword stuffing and making the page content more natural, this improved the page to 25 out of 27, 87% SEO score and 2-page problems. Improvement to 3rd position in Google, but he wants to chase 1st place to be above his competitors, which is fair enough. It turns out that in the past, they have used this type of page to try and get a high ranking for several search terms, as it is a different variation on a tyre size terms are:
205/70 R14, 205/70R14, 205/70 R 14
205/70 X 14, 205/70X14, 205/70 X14
and so on for all the different ways you can search for this tyre size. He is also convinced Google will see these as different search terms, and while I agree to an extent, this causes Keyword Stuffing on the page, which in turn was harming the rankings. Each product listed on the page already has its own title 205/70 R14, 205/70 HR14 and so on, so my question is. What is the best practice for writing content on these types of pages to gain high rankings for several Keywords, and what value does writing the same keyword with spaces and no spaces have? Any help or advice is welcome, so I have a better understanding of how to approach this for this page and the rest of the site. Cheers Mal0 -
Use of subfolders for my casino directory
Been trying to find an answer to this for some time, so I hope someone can lend me a hand.. I've started building out my casino website Nerdybet, which will list regulated gaming vendors within each US state. A part of the idea is to create a high level web directory of legal betting sites. Now, say I want to list all legal casinos within a specific US state. What's the most search engine friendly way to build out the hierarchy? To clarify, this will be the main casino directory page: https://www.nerdybet.com/gambling-sites-directory Based on that, I can now pick either: a) Nerdybet.com/gambling-sites-directory/stateX
On-Page Optimization | | llevy
b)Nerdybet.com/stateX Which method would you say is best? And why so? Thank you.1 -
Should I Use WooCommerce Tags & Attributes?
I'm helping an online furniture store search engine optimize a WooCommerce store and I'm trying to make sure our taxonomies make sense. I'd love any help you guys can give, but I'm particularly interested in determining whether we should use tags. Product attributes make sense to me, but I'm concerned to use tags because of the propensity for creating duplicate content. Thanks in advance for any help you guys are willing to give.
On-Page Optimization | | cbizzle0 -
Images, using a lightbox would it go against adsense TOS?
Something I have been trying to figure out. On my website each member can have up to 10 images. When viewing a profile you can select each different photo and we currently use javascript to display this in a small box so the page does not re-load. I am curious for ideas, would we be better off having the images load on a different page? Giving more pages per visit in GA or would a lightbox type pop up be optimal. My concern is that the lightbox (similar to how Facebook displays images) would be a violation of google adsense TOS. I tried to talk with a help desk member from google regarding this but I am not even sure they could speak english to understand what I was saying. What do you guys think? When it comes to handling groups of images how would you best display them for user happiness and search engine optimisation?
On-Page Optimization | | Burto0 -
Can Cascading DropDown HELP improve site architucture?
Our online stores is selling furnace filters. http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com We have 4 different qualities furnace filters and each of them are avaible in almost 50 different sizes. My store is setup with almost 200 different products. ( 4 filtres X 50 sizes) None of them have variable. I'm looking for a solution to help customers to find there furnace filter size fast and easy on our HOME page. I find this cascading dropdown option http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/CascadingDropDown/CascadingDropDown.aspx where I wiil setup 3 options to select: filter width filter lenght filter depth Will it be the best options? Now my store is setup with categories and it is not the best solution. http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com This was a lots of work to create 200 different products. The reason I did this is because when searching in search engine, vistors will use such keywords: 16x20x4 filter 20x25x2 furnace filter a/c filter 10x20x1 replacement filter online 20x20x1 16x25x5 filter toronto and so on... Must keywords request in search engine will included the furnace filter size. Thank you for your help, BigBlaze
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050 -
To many links hurting me even though they are helping users
I have a scrabble based site where I function as a anagram solver, scrabble dictionary look up and tons of different word lists. In each of these word lists I link every word to my scrabble dictionary. This has caused Google to index 10018 pages total for my site and over 300 of them have well over 100 links. Many of them contain over 1000 links. I know Google's and SEOMOZ stance that anything over 100 will hurt me. I have always seen the warnings in my dashboard warning me of this but I have simply ignored it. I have posted on this Q and A that I have this issue, but IMO having these links benefit the users in the aspect that they don't have to worry about coping the text and putting it in the search box, they can simply click the link. Some have said if it helps the users then I am good, others have said opposite. I am thinking about removing these links from all these word lists to reduce the links per page. My questions are these. 1. If I remove the links from my page could this possible help me? No harm in trying it out so this is an easy question 2. If I remove the links then I will have over 9000 pages that are indexed with Google that no longer have a link pointing to them, except for the aspect that they are indexed with Google still. Is it going to hurt me if I remove these links and Google no longer sees them linked from my site or anywhere else?
On-Page Optimization | | cbielich0 -
What does Canonical mean?
Hi, I was wondering what is meant by canonical? I ran a test on my site and in the notices, SEOMOZ came back with a total of 90 canonicals. As far as I can tell, it refers to the preferred page (not really sure what that means though). I thought initially it was talking about duplicate content, but all the pages are totally different. There is no duplicate content on any of he pages that it lists. So I'm not sure how to fix this. Thanks for the help. Don
On-Page Optimization | | ge01734000 -
Post Title - Use the blog's name or not?
In the tile of my post, shoudl I used my blog's name in it at the end or emit the blog name. EX: title of post with keywords | name of blog OR EX: title of post with keywords The site's name is 3 words long, so I'm worrying that those extra words are diluting the keywords in the post's name that I'm trying to target.
On-Page Optimization | | gregalam0