Canonical Tags?

[Boodreaux]

I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content.  The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly)  are ranking higher than the "good URL" links.

So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop.   I even read that google might even completely overlook the links.  I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Boo

[Dr-Pete]

We strongly suspect that canonical tags lose a portion of link "juice" just like 301s do. Otherwise, they could be abused.

[Dr-Pete]

I can't debate one thing - we certainly don't have all the information, and that can lead to bad advice at times.

I disagree on a couple of points:

(1) User-friendly URLs can have both usability and SEO advantages, whether or not they're meant to be typed in directly. Typically, those advantages are minor, but descriptive URLs can certainly boost SEO a small degree.

(2) If your URLs have spaces in them, they are probably being converted in some cases to "%20" (that's the URL-encoded equivalent of a space). It's generally a bad idea to have internal URLs with spaces, and this can lead to minor problems. This explanation sounds a little dubious to me. I'd highly recommend you run an internal crawl with a tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog - you might turn up badly formed internal URLs. I can't prove that, but I'd check if it were me. Hyphens don't "turn into" spaces.

Overall, this reads to me like a list of excuses, not solutions.

[Boodreaux]

Jake Madison mentioned this one time.

Any Redirect will lose value. A 301 loses a portion of your juice and a 302 gives you nothing. What the canonical tag does is redirect the authority of the page with the tag to the target page you want to hold the authority (usually the parent page, be it Root Domain, primary landing page or a subcategory page)

Google has a new fantastic tool I think everyone should know about called Google Tag Manager. It creates a container under the that you can fill with any tag, Google or non-Google tags. It is fantastic because you don't need your programer to go in and change anything and no need to access code. It gives the power to you to add and remove tags and define the parameters of each one you put in place. in addition it builds the tag for you if you aren't a code wizard. this makes the world of SEO and OSO shake due to the rainbows and sunshine of not having t bother your programer with little fixes like tag adding and removal.

I hope this helped!

Cheers!

[Boodreaux]

Here is what my computer programmer told me...what do you think? (I was mistaken and thought the links were from our advanced search option but they are just links from other sites that are more authoritative than ours I guess. There's a few things here to address, I'm going to try to put it simply. If you want more details I can expound on it:

I think you aren't giving enough information here, and it could potentially cause people to give you bad advice. First off, URLs (generally speaking) aren't meant to be user friendly, unless the user is going to actually type it in. In your case, URLs with %20 in them are never meant to be typed, so it doesn't matter. Second, we don't supply URLs from the site using %20, so we can't do anything about those anyways. One possibility is that websites who are linking to yours have an algorithm that converts hyphens to spaces... and spaces get converted to %20 by many browsers and other internet services.

Second: Don't forget that when we first built the site, we didn't have the vanity URLs (the specialty names)... so the category links with the hyphens-turned-spaces-turned-%20 could very well just be happening because those pages are so much older than the vanity URLs, also, our outbound feeds used to use the old URLs too, so if we provided a feed to a site with those links, and they haven't bothered to update, then those links are still going to be out there. Google sees the links on your site, but they also see the links that come inbound from other sites, and that's why google still has the old URLs listed. The best way to fix this is to use the canonical meta link, to explain to google that the authoritative source is the vanity URL.

[Dr-Pete]

I tend to agree - these pages are often very low-value for Google and can spin out of control. The canonical tag is a great way to conslidate unavoidable duplicates, but in many cases it's better not to create them at all. Of course, these situations can be very complex, and it's tough to speak in generalities.

[TakeshiYoung]

By search pages, I'm assuming these are automated pages being generated by users searching for things on your site?  Pages like these can be seen as 'thin content' and could lead to a penalty from Google.

Also, the question to ask yourself is why are these pages outranking your actual content?  Is it because you're linking to them more prominently?  Then you'll want to improve your internal linking.  Is it because they have a lot of content?  Then add more content to your main pages.  Is it because they target keywords that your main content doesn't?  Then create content around the keywords that people are searching for.

[Boodreaux]

Takeshi,

If I no index my higher ranking search links then I will not be ranked as high in google because those will fall completely off right.  Are you saying just noindex them...let them fall out of the rankings and then focus long term on getting the main pages ranked above the search pages in order to avoid panda penalties. (I didn't even know I was doing anything wrong)

Boo

[TakeshiYoung]

You want to use a canonical tag on your site if you have any duplicate content.  The canonical tag basically tells Google and other search engines which version of the page is the original, or canonical version of the content.

If you're generating a lot of URLs via your search feature, that sounds like it may be a different problem than having a lot of duplicate content.  Autogenerating a content via search results is always a risky proposition, which can get you more traffic in the short term, but could get you hit by Panda if it gets out of hand.

My advice would be to noindex the pages generated through search, and create actual high quality content pages for the queries you seem to be getting a lot of traffic for.