Regarding Rel Canonical on PhoneTech.dk
-
Hi All you Seo Experts from seomoz
I have a question about one of my webshops where I have the same product listed in different categories where I on the duplicate pages use the Rel Caninical Tag on, that points to the main product url. I just have to verify with you guys that I did it correctly
Example on the shop. This is just an example
www.phonetech.dk/shop/product1.html - This is Main
Duplicates
www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3G/product1.html - Canonical Tag on this one pointing to the main.
www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3g/backcovers/product1.html - Canonical Tag on this one pointing to the main.
www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3gs/colorbackcovers/product1.html - Canonical Tag here also pointing to main
Hope you guys can help me that my use of Canonical Tag is correct.
Regards
Christian - Denmark
-
Are these pages identical, but just reached via different paths (based on category/sub-category navigation)? If so, the canonical tag is definitely a good choice here. Ideally, it's best not to create duplicate paths, as it can cause long-term problems, but in lieu of that, canonical is probably your best defense.
-
It was just an example, its now live url's
-
It's fine to not include the canonical on the main/target page. As @donford said, it's fine to have a self-reference canonical, but it's definitely not necessary.
-
Are these live pages, or did something page (I can't seem to access them). Looking at the URLs, it seems like these are slightly different products, so I'm not clear if the canonical tag is appropriate.
-
Rel canonical tags should be on the pages that they are dealing with.
In my example above a rel canonical tag would be fine all the pages
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red&Size=L
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red&Size=L&Gender=FOn each of the pages the tag would be
href="http://www.awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14"/>
You would not put it on the page
awebsite.com/t-shirts/ or awebsite.com
Hope that clarifies it for you.
-
Ok but its ok if it not included on the main page?
-
It doesn't need to be, but given the way the tag works, it does not hurt if the page you're on, is the path of the rel canonical.
Since the tag deals with dynamic pages it is very normal for the root page to have the tag as well as the dynamic pages.
-
Ok, but the canonical tag shall not be on the main right?
-
Hi Christian that is basically what the REL canonical is for, typically it is used to deal with dynamic urls like
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red&Size=L
awebsite.com/t-shirts/product_id=14?color=Red&Size=L&Gender=FI have seen some ecommerce shops that allow you to copy products from one category to another, if you do this, then yes REL canonical is how I would deal with this myself.
Hope it helps,
Don
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 Sponsored on Internal Links
Hi all. Should you use rel sponsored on internal links? Here is the scenario: a company accepts money from one of their partners to place a prominent link on their home page. That link goes to an internal page on the company's website that contains information about that partner's service. If this was an external link that the partner was paying for, then you would obviously use rel="sponsored" but since this is a link that goes from awebsite.com to awebsite.com/some-page/, it seems odd to qualify that link in this way. Does this change if the link contains a "sponsored" label in the text (not in the rel qualifier)? Does this change if this link looks more like an ad (i.e. a banner image) vs. regular text (i.e. a link in a paragraph)? Thanks for any and all guidance or examples you can share!
Technical SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Does Canonical Tag Syntax Matter?
Does anyone know definitively if the format of the canonical tag matters? Silly question I know. vs
Technical SEO | | Healio0 -
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
Rel=canonical - Identical .com and .us Version of Site
We have a .us and a .com version of our site that we direct customers to based on location to servers. This is not changing for the foreseeable future. We had restricted Google from crawling the .us version of the site and all was fine until I started to see the https version of the .us appearing in the SERPs for certain keywords we keep an eye on. The .com still exists and is sometimes directly above or under the .us. It is occasionally a different page on the site with similar content to the query, or sometimes it just returns the exact same page for both the .com and the .us results. This has me worried about duplicate content issues. The question(s): Should I just get the https version of the .us to not be crawled/indexed and leave it at that or should I work to get a rel=canonical set up for the entire .us to .com (making the .com the canonical version)? Are there any major pitfalls I should be aware of in regards to the rel=canonical across the entire domain (both the .us and .com are identical and these newly crawled/indexed .us pages rank pretty nicely sometimes)? Am I better off just correcting it so the .us is no longer crawled and indexed and leaving it at that? Side question: Have any ecommerce guys noticed that Googlebot has started to crawl/index and serve up https version of your URLs in the SERPs even if the only way to get into those versions of the pages are to either append the https:// yourself to the URL or to go through a sign in or check out page? Is Google, in the wake of their https everywhere and potentially making it a ranking signal, forcing the check for the https of any given URL and choosing to index that? I just can't figure out how it is even finding those URLs to index if it isn't seeing http://www.example.com and then adding the https:// itself and checking... Help/insight on either point would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
How to fix rel canonical tags?
Hello there, I am trying to fix the issues with my campaign and I am trying to fix Rel canonical issues. I tried to read a few blogs and other sources which talked about the Rel canonical but I am not able to understand why is Rel Canonical happening? I understand that http://elegancealways.com is not the same as http://elegancealways.com/about-us/ but then I cannot change the link as the link is correct. I read about 301 and 302 redirects. I do not understand that which link is correct then? The errors SEO MOZ is showing is what I am not able to understand as these links are correct. I need help here!! Thanks Vineeta qTc2a2H.png
Technical SEO | | vineeta0 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2 -
Canonicals for Real Estate
A real estate site has a landing page for a particular zip code: site.com/zip/99999 On this page, there are links which add arguments to the URL, resulting in structures like this: site.com/zip/99999?maxprice=1000000&maxbeds=3 My question is on using a canonical URL for the pages with arguments. These pages may have lots of duplicate content, so should I direct search engines back to the base URL for the search? (site.com/zip/99999) A side note is that these pages with arguments could have no listings returned (no listings found) or could come back with listings (then it wouldn't be duplicate), but that can change on a day to day basis.
Technical SEO | | SteveCastaneda0 -
Rel canonical or 301 the Index Page?
Still a bit confused on best practice for /index.php showing up as duplicate for www.mysite.com. What do I need to do and How?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110