Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Category page canonical tag
-
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice.
Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page.
There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example:
/range.html?p=2
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=priceIs it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag?
After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated.
Chris.
-
Thanks DP for the input!
-
It's tricky. Practically, I tend to agree with Tom - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Especially at small-to-medium scale (let's say hundreds of URLs, but not thousands), rel=canonical is probably going to do the job here.
Technically, CleverPhd is correct that paginated content may be better served by rel=prev/next, and Google isn't fond of you canonical'ing to page 1 of search results. Their other preferred method is to canonical to a "View All" page (and make that page/link available to visitors), if that page loads reasonably and isn't huge.
In practice, they don't seem to penalized anyone for a canonical to page 1, and I know some mega-site SEOs who use rel=prev/next and have been almost completely unable to tell if it works (based on how Google still indexes and ranks the content). I think the critical thing is to keep most of these pages out of the index and avoid the duplicates. If your approach is working for now, my gut says to leave it alone.
-
I would agree that use of the canonical tag is great, I would not say that it is the most optimal solution in this case as you have paginated results
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
The use of rel next prev would be more appropriate in that case. It has the advantage of also letting the link juice flow properly and it is what Google "expects" to see.
Now, if you wanted to be more conservative with this approach, you could add the meta noindex so that you also get all the other paginated pages out of the index, but this is an optional step.
One other thing to think about, if this is not a pagination issue, but this is more like a search result or resort of the same page, I would no follow links to those pages and noindex the resulting duplicates. You have to think about crawl efficiency and if you are having Google crawl a bunch of thin pages that you are trying to canonical to a parent page, you are wasting Google's time. Google will only spend so much time on a site spidering. Do you want it to waste time spidering a ton of pages that dont matter? Sure, the canonical would give Google all the right signals of what page goes where, but why would you want it to waste time doing that. You would rather Google spend time on your most important pages and spidering and reindexing those. Think about it, if you are going to ask a math savant to help you with your homework, are you going to have him/her spend time helping you with 1000 simple addition problems? No! You would go right to the more important/complex items.
http://searchengineland.com/how-i-think-crawl-budget-works-sort-of-59768
Anyway, hope this helps give you another perspective. Someone will probably say, well, this only matters on larger sites etc. I say no, it matters on all sites as you always want to have your best foot forward when the spiders come a crawling.
-
Hi Chris
First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing. It's working well - and here's why:
Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.
Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"
Now, why would you want to do this? Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).
Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.
Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.
Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages. That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs. This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.
But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job. Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"
So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well. Very well, in fact. If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.
So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!
Hope this helps.
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
-
Value of using spaces or no spaces on product category page varient keywords
Hello, all fellow Mozzers,
On-Page Optimization | | JamesDavison
I have taken over a project and this account, so can't change the username according to MOZ.🙃 We run an eCommerce website, and to me, some of the content is conflicting as some pages have more information content than what I would put in a commerce page, but this is how the boss wants it to work, personally, I would separate the content out.
The page I'm working on:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/205-70-14.html
and this is an example of the rest of these types of pages, I will be tackling:
https://www.longstonetyres.co.uk/tyres/125-15.html I was tasked to improve SEO ranking, when using the MOZ page grader I had a score of 24 out of 27 83% SEO score and 3-page problems. 7th position in Google for the search term 205/70 R14 As it is a generic product listing page, It was pointless to add to the URL and the Internal links I can't reduce as these are links to products, so I went to reduce the
keyword stuffing and making the page content more natural, this improved the page to 25 out of 27, 87% SEO score and 2-page problems. Improvement to 3rd position in Google, but he wants to chase 1st place to be above his competitors, which is fair enough. It turns out that in the past, they have used this type of page to try and get a high ranking for several search terms, as it is a different variation on a tyre size terms are:
205/70 R14, 205/70R14, 205/70 R 14
205/70 X 14, 205/70X14, 205/70 X14
and so on for all the different ways you can search for this tyre size. He is also convinced Google will see these as different search terms, and while I agree to an extent, this causes Keyword Stuffing on the page, which in turn was harming the rankings. Each product listed on the page already has its own title 205/70 R14, 205/70 HR14 and so on, so my question is. What is the best practice for writing content on these types of pages to gain high rankings for several Keywords, and what value does writing the same keyword with spaces and no spaces have? Any help or advice is welcome, so I have a better understanding of how to approach this for this page and the rest of the site. Cheers Mal0 -
H1 tag- on home page - what is it best to include
is it best to have in the H1 tag 1. just our website address 2. combination of website address followed by short keywords about our website
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Colons in title tag?
Does Google view the colon as a keyword separator like it does with the pipe (|) character? Currently, our site automatically constructs the title tag based on the page name given by the user. Long ago, we started using the colon character to visually separate the brand & model of the product from the size, and as a result, all of our title tags have been constructed this way. This was done more to make it easier to read for humans than for search engines. My question is - should I consider getting rid of the colon from our title tags? To give more info, our website sells tires. So, for any given model of tire, there might be 25-100 different individual sizes. The tags are constructed as follows: (brand)(model) : (size). Here's an example from our site: GENERAL ALTIMAX ARCTIC : 225/45R17 91Q The brand is General Tire, the model is the Altimax Arctic and the size is 225/45R17 91Q Since this entire string really constitutes the full product name, should I remove the colon so that Google views it that way? Or, since I have used a colon instead of a pipe, will Google simply ignore it and treat the entire string as one keyword phrase?
On-Page Optimization | | kcourtem0 -
How do I remove a Canonical URL Tag?
Some of my report cards say I have too many canonical URL tags. However, there is no information no how to delete one. Can someone give me a link or explain? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
How much copy should there be on an e-commerce category page?
I'm not looking for a precise number, obviously. I'm more interested in a general range. More text means more long-tail and synonym opportunities, but of course you don't want too much copy above the fold, pushing your products down. Maybe you can get away with a short paragraph or two at the top of the page. You can always put more copy below the products, but in a recent SEOmoz e-commerce webinar, the presenter seemed to think that was silly and unnecessary. He even suggested that the algo might intentionally ignore text below products, since it's clearly not intended to be read. What do you think?
On-Page Optimization | | CMC-SD0 -
Category Pages with Sub-Categories
The image will explain it all... Each category page starts on the subject of the first sub-category page. This happens twice (well actually 3 times since this section of the site is called showroom and it starts on the tab mowers). Is this a terrible approach? If so, how could a site like this be better navigation-ally organized. cat-subcat.png
On-Page Optimization | | drewschmaltz0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5