Canonical url question
-
i just search seomoz tooll
it say duplicate content for
and
should i use canonical url for this ?
is yes then
is this right ?
-
Yeah, I think canonical is fine for "index.php" variants. One important addition, though. Check your internal link structure. Many sites link to "index.php" via their "Home" link or logo. I'd suggest changing that to an absolute URL or just "/". That way, you're not creating the non-canonical version in the first place.
-
thats why i said the bit about using non-www in htaccess too
-
no trailing slash where you've got say .php or .html at the end
-
I mean canonical is not a bad idea but my suggestion was to use 301 redirection from all different forms of domain URL to your prefered version so that all juice that you have on different URLs can transfer to the preferred version and at the same time visitors also redirect to the URL version you want....
-
-
In addition to those 301 rules stick this in your htacess file
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html site-down.php
it tells the browser and bots which page is the default for your folders and root.
Also ensure your non-www forward to www. using this code
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L] -
This is a great question. Yes, you should use a canonical tag. But, I would suggest that your canonical tag needs to be:
Notice the addition of the '/"
THe, I would also make sure that these URLs produce 301 status codes when going through your server:
This is very important so as not to fragment your link profile and also not to produce massive amounts (potentially) of duplicate content in Google and other search engines.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Canonical Tag Question Regarding Two State Pages
Hi Moz Fam! Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages. Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Is 1:1 301 redirect required on indexed URL when restructing URL even if the new URL is canonicalized?
Hello folks, We are restructuring some URLS which forms a fair chunk of the content of the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB17
These content are auto generated rather than manually created unlike other parts of the website. The same content is currently accessible from two URLs: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn The URL 1 uses the URL 2 as the canonical url and it has worked allright since Moz does
not show the two as duplicate of each other. Google has also indexed the canonical URL although
there is still a few 'URL 1s' which were indexed before the canonical was implemented. The updated URL structure will look like something like this: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn It would be great to have just a single URL but a few business requirement prevents
us from having just the canonical URL only even with the new structure. Since we will still have two URLs to access the same content and we were wondering
whether we will need to do a 1:1 301 redirect on the current URLs or since there will be canonical URL
(/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn),
we won't need to worry about doing the 1:1 redirect on the the indexed content? Please note that the content will still be accessible from the OLD URL (unless 301ed of course). If it is advisable to do a 1:1 301 redirect this is what we intend to do: /used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/used-books/autobiography-a-long-walk-to-freedom-author-name-isbn /autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-isbn 301 to
/autobiography/used-books/a-long-walk-to-freedom-authore-name-isbn Any advice/suggestions would be greated appreciated. Thank you.0 -
Blog comments - backlinks - question
Hi, I see that many good websites have backlinks from very good blogs/sites which are relative. What I noticed that everyone use their real name or generic name in comments. They do not use the keyword for the name. So later they get backlinks with anchor text of their names... So, my question is this good technique ? Do I have any benefits from these backlinks for my website ? With such a technique, whether it is enough just to leave your real name or may I periodically put the keyword for the name ? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ivek990 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Canonical Issue need hep
Hi Is my site has any issue with duplicate pages within the site , have i define my canonical tag properly , can any one advise please help. childrensfunkyfurniture.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
URL rewrites
We have a problem whereby a number of our urls are adressable from different urls - I'm told because of a quirk of developing in .net. e.g. mysite/FundComparison mysite/Fund-comparison mysite/fund-comparison We asked our supplier who hosts this section of our site to do some url rewrites so that the duplicates would 301 to the correct url. They're on IIS 6.0 and are not ready to upgrade to IIS 7.0 (my recommendation, which makes it easier for them to do the rewrite using the rewrite module). They said it would take 6-8 weeks to implement a web controller to do this. "The bulk of the time for this implementation is in the build of the engine + the addition of all the possible permutations of the URL to redirect to the proper URL." This sounds absolutely insane to me. I would have thought it could be done in a matter of hours. What do people think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Rel canonical and duplicate subdomains
Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010