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
-
Domain Level Redirects - HTTP and HTTPS
About 2 years ago (well before I started with the company), we did an http=>https migration. It was not done correctly. The http=>https redirect was never inserted into the .htaccess file. In essence, we have 2 websites. According to Google search console, we have 19,000 HTTP URLs indexed and 9,500 HTTPS URLs indexed. I've done a larger scale http=>https migration (60,000 SKUs), and our rankings dropped significantly for 6-8 weeks. We did this the right way, using sitemaps, and http and https GSC properties. Google came out recently and said that this type of rankings drop is normal for large sites. I need to set the appropriate expectations for management. Questions: How badly is the domain split affecting our rankings, if at all? Our rankings aren't bad, but I believe we are underperforming our backlink profile. Can we expect a net rankings gain when the smoke clears? There are a number of other technical SEO issues going on as well. How badly will our rankings drop (temporarily) and for how long when we add the redirect to the .htaccess file? Is there a way to mitigate the rankings impact? For example, only submitting partial sitemaps to our GSC http property? Has anyone gone through this before?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Is there a way to rel = canonical only part of a page?
Hi guys: I'm doing SEO for a boat accessories store, and for instance they have marine AC systems, many of them, and while the part number, number of BTUs, voltage, and accessories change on some models, the description stays exactly the same across the board on many of them...people often search on Google by model number, and I worry that if I put rel = canonical, then the result for that specific model they're looking for won't come up, just the one that everything is being redirected to. (and people do this much more than entering a site nowadays and searching by product model, it's easier). Excuse my ignorance on this stuff, I'm good with link building and content creation, but the behind-the-scenes aspects... not so much: Can I "rel=canonical" only part of the page of the repeat models (the long description)? so people can still search by model number, and reach the model they are looking for? Am I misunderstanding something here about rel=canonical (Interesting thing, I rank very high for these pages with tons of repeat descriptions, number one in many places... but wonder if google attributes a sort of "across the site" penalty for the repeated content... but wouldn't ranking number 1 for these pages mean nothing's wrong?. Thanks)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidCiti1 -
Using del canonical for subpage relating to homepage
Hi, I have a subpage that has a Moz-Page Optimization score for a keyword of 98%. Nevertheless that page is not seen on page one of google. Instead google shows the homepage of the same site which has only an optimization score of around 50%. Now Moz suggests to implement a del canonical tag. Should I implement one in the subpage relating to the homepage? I have never done this and am a little unsure. What if there are other keywords for which the homepage should be shown? Will the homepage still show up? Best wishes Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
Hi We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself! Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henya0 -
Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain. We have set up different rel="alternative codes like: The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com? For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to: Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlliedComputer
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html0 -
Canonical tags required when redirecting?
Hello, My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links. The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites? Any thoughts? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eblan0 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
Rel=alternate to help localize sites
I am wondering about the efficiency of the rel=alternate tag and how well it works at specifically localizing content. Example: I have a website on a few ccTLD's but for some reason my .com shows up on Google.co.uk before my .co.uk version of my page. Some people have mentioned using rel=alternate but in my research this only seems to be applicable for duplicate content in another language. If I am wrong here can somebody please help me better understand this application of the rel=alternate tag. All my research leads me to rel=alternate hreflang= and I am not sure that is what I want. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Chris Birkholm0