Why do Twitter Canonicalise to Home?
-
I have just noticed that Twitter canonicalise back to their homepage from every profile page that I checked.
Check the source on any profile, and the canonical looks like this:
rel="canonical" href="https://twitter.com/" />
Have I completely missed something here? I don't get why Twitter need to, or indeed would want to do this.
As far as I understand it, Twitter is hinting to Google that they should ignore profile pages and only rank the homepage. Except Google doesn't. If you search for "Rand Fishkin Twitter", you'll get Rand's page. Search "[Anyone You Like] Twitter" and you'll get to their exact page.
Hope somebody can shed some light on this, as it seems counter intuitive to tell Google to ignore profile pages when I imagine a significant chunk of their search traffic comes from people searching Google for specific profiles.
Cheers,
Mark
-
Hi William,
Thanks for your opinion - I must admit it still seems strange to me. OK so they want to give the Twitter homepage more authority - but in doing so make it less likely that individual profiles get ranked? Obviously they are aware that Google will index deeper pages anyway, as that's exactly what they are doing. I know that canonical is a hint, but it seems pointless when they must get a load of value from profile pages.
Would love to hear from somebody who has a really good idea of why - still a mystery to me!
Thanks,
Mark
-
I believe it might be for users logged in to differentiiate.
When you are at your own homepage I think its like twitter.com/#
or
It could be to point more authority to the homepage as whole. Canonical is just a "hey you SHOULD", doesn't mean you HAVE TO.
Canonical links are to help search engines.
This is my opinion.
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
-
How to Canonicalise all filter pages (URL parameters) to the main category
Hi guys, I am working on an e-commerce site that's running in Shopify. I noticed that the filter pages do not have canonical tags pointing to their respective main categories. I doubt that the action needed is to canonicalise each filter pages to the main category as it would take time (there are a lot of filter URLs involved). Do you know any technical coding to do in Shopify to have all filter pages canonicalise to its main category? Keen to hear from you. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brandonegroup0 -
Recommend Layout Page (home, categories or section, individual page)
Hello Could you please share with me your advice and recommendations on how to design a SEO layout (H1, Image, body text, etc). I need to give instructions to our website designer. I would like to see some examples. We are going to work with wordpress and visual composer. I really appreciate your help and time Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GHSCostaRica0 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Does Google View "SRC", "HREF", TITLE and Alt tags as Duplicate Content on Home Page Slider?
Greetings MOZ Community. A keyword matrix was developed by my SEO firm. I am in the process of integrating primary, secondary and terciary phrases into the text and am also sprinkling three or four other terms. Using a keyword density tool (http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) the results were somewhat unexpected after I optimized. So I then looked at the source code and noticed text from HREF, ALT and SRC tags that may be effecting how Google would interpret text on the page. Our home page (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains a slider with commercial real estate listings. Would Google index the SRC, HREF, TITLE and ALT tags in these slider items? Would this be detrimental to SEO? The code for one listing (and there are 7-8 in the slider) looks like this: | href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York">Class A Fifth Avenue Offices class="blockLeft"><a< p=""></a<> href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York"> src="http://dr0nu3l9a17ym.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/fsrep/houses/125x100/305.jpg" alt="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York" width="125" height="94" /> 1,340 Sq. Ft. $5,918 / month Fifth Avenue Midtown / Grand Central <a< p=""></a<> | Could the repetition of the title text ("lease a Prestigious Fifth...") trigger a duplicate content penalty? Should the slider content be blocked or set to no-index by some kind of a Java script? We have worked very hard to optimize the home page so it would be a real shame if through some technical oversight we got hit by a Google Panda penalty. Thanks, Alan Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Optimum Word Count for Home Page Text
We operate a commercial real estate web site (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) in New York City. Our home page text is about 500 words. Currently the home page text is of a promotional nature and not very engaging. We are attempting to write a check list for companies that are seeking to lease commercial space and make the text very useful, practical and engaging. However we are having difficulty covering all the bases with less than 1,000 words. If the home page text has 1,000-1,300 words is that detrimental from an SEO point of view? On the plus side I would think this would allow us to include several secondary keyword terms and to add plurals and variations of the two or three top phrases. Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks, Alan Rosinsky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How many links home on a page?
We are planning on a mega menu which will have around 300 links and a mega slider which will have around 175 links if our developer has their way. In all I could be looking at over 500 links from the home page. The Mega Menu will flatten the site link structure out but I am worried this slider on the home page which is our 4th most visited page behind our 3 core category pages. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robertrRSwalters0 -
Which page to target? Home or /landing-page
I have optimized my home page for the keyword "computer repairs" would I be better of targeting my links at this page or an additional page (which already exists) called /repairs it's possible to rename & 301 this page to /computer-repairs The only advantage I can see from targeting /computer-repairs is that the keywords are in the target URL.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
What causes internal pages to have a page rank of 0 if the home page is PR 5?
The home page PageRank is 5 but every single internal page is PR 0. Things I know I need to address each page has 300 links (Menu problem). Each article has 2-3 duplicates caused from the CMS working on this now. Has anyone else had this problem before? What things should I look out for to fix this issue. All internal linking is follow there is no page rank sculpting happening on the pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBrent0