Canonical Tags?
-
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
-
We strongly suspect that canonical tags lose a portion of link "juice" just like 301s do. Otherwise, they could be abused.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
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 does a page with a canonical for another domain impact SEO?
Hi, We have a requirement to host files that contains .html, .css, .js, and .pdf files externally on AWS S3 bucket. We have a landing page on our site that contains a link to those external links (i.e. pdf). On our site's (hosted on Drupal), landing page we already have a canonical link for the current landing page. On the .html file which is hosted externally, we were thinking to add the same canonical link that exists for the landing page so that search engines will go to the externally available .html file and interpret that the externally hosted file is related to our landing page. I was wondering if this is an acceptable solution without any SEO penalty. If there is a penalty, what would be the alternative solution to this so we can host files externally and drive most of the traffic to our landing page? Example Landing page: absolute url = https://www.site-domain.com/page-url ...... Externally available .html file (static) ......
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KendallHershey0 -
Canonical Tag help
Hello everyone, We have implemented canonical tag on our website: http://www.indialetsplay.com/ For e.g. on http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=42 we added canonical as http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=all (as it showcase all products) Our default page is http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers Is canonical tag implementation right? Or we need to add any other URL. Please suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are: www.domain.com/product123
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
www.domain.com/Product123 To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago. Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123. So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls. A few questions here: -Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page? -Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory? Looking forward to your opinions.0 -
Rel=Canonical=CONFUSED
Hey, I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help! I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on). These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com. The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice: I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites. This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains. It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results. Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
Is a separate title tags and description reqquired
is it a separate title tags and description for all pagination pages. We have common title tag and meta desciption of all pagination pages should we need to modify the same
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
Is a 301 Direct with a canonical tag Possible ?
Hi All, Quick question , Are we correct in thinking that for any given URL it's not possible to do a 301 redirect AND a canonical tag? thanks Sarah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Does having several long title tags hurt you?
Our title tags are dynamically generated, and some have over 140 characters. Does having a large quantity of URLS with an excessive number of characters hurt you in any way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Reducing pages with canonical & redirects
We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service. example: colorado/denver - main city page colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city. There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content! This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together. We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc. Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input: Canonicalize Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1) 301 Redirect On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls. We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results. We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trentc0