HTTPS in Rel Canonical
-
Hi,
Should I, or do I need to, use HTTPS (note the "S") in my canonical tags?
Thanks
Andrew
-
Thanks Alan all done so far so good thanks for your help
-
Yeah, definitely agree - the how/why of using https in general is a much broader and more difficult question.
You said the first link was http (not secure), but it looks like it redirects to a secure page? I'm not seeing any crawl issues, although I wonder if the combination of a footer link and the page looking like a lead-gen page is causing Google to ignore it. Honestly, though, it feels more like a technical issue. I'm not seeing any red flags, though.
-
in iis cp find the folder secure, slect ssl settings from the mail window, and tick "require https", they will now be forced to use https for that folder.
Next if you haven't already, using web platform installer, install url rewrite in IIS, best grab SEO toolkit while you are there. Restart IIS cp after install
Select the site then go to url rewrite,
click add rule
Select blank rule
fill in as per screen shots here
http://screencast.com/t/6qUxduZ7UxWz
http://screencast.com/t/cvivbdFsm
If any problems get back to me. I did this without testing.
If you installed seo toolkit also, you will see there are some ready built rules at bottom, see tutorials here if needed.http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials
Note with the rule remove append trailing slash, I always select remove as when people type out your url they never put a slash on the end.
When your done select the site again and have a play with the SEO toolkit, do a scan on your site.
let me know how you went
-
-
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks, we are using IIS, could you please explain how to do this further please. Do you think this maybe the cause of google not seeing and indexing HTTPS page?
Thanks
Andrew
-
In Microsoft IIS server you can require uses use https on a folder basis, you seem to want to force to not use https, this can be done by writing a urlrewrite rule.
If your site does not use https at all, then just remove the binging for SSL. If you have some https pages and some without then you need to do the above.
If you are using a lynix type server then you will have to look it up, if you are using
IIS I can show you how to do this. -
Hi
Thank you both for your responses. Alan your point is very interesting. The main reason for asking the question is because we are desperately trying to find a solution to why our HTTPS page is not being indexed by google 6 weeks after going live. There are 2 other SEOMoz posts by us that have not been able to answer this "Mystery"
www.seomoz.org/q/why-isn-t-google-indexing-our-site
www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-our-page-will-not-being-found-by-google
The HTTPS page in question HTTPS://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/invoiceTemplate is in fact references via a link at the bottom of HTTP://www.invoicestudio.com (note no "S").
Alan could you please explain your answer further as I do not fully understand what you are saying but it sounds like the HTTP link to HTTPS maybe causing the issue and would like to explore further to solve this long standing issue that is very important to us.
Thanks
Andrew.
-
Dr Pete as usual is correct here, but I would ask a further question, is your page accessed from both http and https? if so I would make the page "https required" so it is not, and use a 301 if you all ready have links to http.
I work on Microsoft IIS servers this is very easy to do, not sure how you do it on lynix
-
If the canonical version of your URLs is secure (HTTPS), then yes - you should use absolute paths with "https://" in the them for your canonical tags.
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 canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages
The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan0 -
Redirect chains from switch to HTTPS
Hi, We have a client who recently switched their site to https:// The rule to force redirect non-secure URLs to https is in their .htaccess file: RewriteEngine on if non-SSL and one of these, redirect to SSL RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundabout
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.clientdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] However, they also have simple redirects below this rule that redirect one page to another, such as: Redirect 301 /old.php https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php This is causing redirect chains like this: (A) http://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (B) https://www.clientdomain.com/old.php > (C) https://www.clientdomain.com/new.php Is there any way to rewrite the rules in .htaccess to get rid of these redirect chains? So that URL A goes directly to URL C? Thank you!1 -
Http & https domain names
We currently have a site which we found SEM Rush to show that their were duplicate pages for the site. Upon further inspection we realized this was because there existed both http:// and https:// Versions of the site. Is this a problem for Google that the site appears for both http:// and https:// and that there are therefore duplicate versions of the site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavo0 -
Duplicate Content Errors new website. How do you know which page to put the rel canonical tag on?
I am having problems with duplicate content. This is a new website and all the pages have the same page and domain rank, the following is an example of the homepage. How do you know which page to use the canonical tag on? http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php http://medresourcesupply.com/ Would this be the correct way to use this? Here is another example where Moz says these are duplicates. I can't figure out why because they have different url's and content. http://medresourcesupply.com/clutching_at_the_throat http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=detailed_specfications &category=Main
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz0 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Http, https and link juice
I'm working on a site that is built on DNN. For some reason the client has set all pages to convert to HTTPS (although this is not perfect as some don't when landing on them). All pages indexed in Google are straight HTTP, but when you click on the Google result a temp 302 header response to the corresponding HTTPS page for many. I want it changed to a 301 but unfortunately is an issue for DNN. Is there another way around this in IIS that won't break DNN as it seems to be a bit flaky? I want to have the homepage link juice pass through for all links made to non HTTPS homepage. Removing HTTPS does not seem to be an option for them.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0