Intra-linking to pages with a different Canonical url ?
-
Hello Moz Community!
I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate.
Scenario:
Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry.
Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site).
Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes'
Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True
SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term.
The Issue / Question:
Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True
Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category?
OR
Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?
-
Thanks for the thorough response! Ecommerce sure does add a level of complexity to the whole process.
-
Categorization is a difficult issue for ecommerce sites. You want to have enough categories so people can easily find products, but at the same time you do not want to risk a duplicate content penalty or a then content penalty, by being over categorized.
I think with the canonical url pointing to the no filtered page it will be next to impossible to rank the page. If you are looking for click throughs from organic sources, it should work, but from search engines I don't think it will.
The way I handled the issue with one of my clients might be something you could do and it would provide better results. In the ecommerce platform I use it has searches and filters as well. What I did with their shop was I created a module that would handle some searches and filters differently. Basically they could enter a term in the module, say christmas, and any searches or filters on the site for the exact match word would rewrite the term as a psuedo category. It is kind of hard to explain the logic, but it created a stub page, like in your case would be something like /drivetrain/road-cassettes where the cannocial url could be set to the page, the meta description, title, and on page category description could be different. But the page was not accessible through any category structure or any other way, just through the search and filters. Basically what you are creating is a landing page catered to search terms.
If this is done sparingly, there is no issue with it, if you go through and make 10k pages like this, you might get a penalty. What I did was take the top terms that had been searched in the site and used them as a list of what landing pages to make.
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
-
Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image
There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan1 -
Different text position on mobile and desktop page
Hi there, We have product category descriptions in our webshop, with one smal difference: desktop: the first paragraf is at the top above the products with a scroll down to the other paragrafs below the products mobile: the whole text is below the products I am wondering whether it is allright in regards of the mobile first index, or should we have exactly the same paragraf split on the desktop and mobile version? Eg. dadum.pl/zabawki Thanks in advance for your opinions. Isabelle
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isabelledylag0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Internal page links and possible penalties
If one looks at a page on our client's website, (http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/paper-98-the-melchizedek-teachings-in-the-occident for example), there are a huge amount of links in the body of the page. All internal links are normal links. All external links arerel="nofollow" class="externallink" We have two questions: 1. Could we be being penalized by google for having too many links on these pages? Will this show i our webmaster reports? 2. If we are being penalized, can we keep the links (and have no penalty) if we made the internal links rel="nofollow" class="externallink" as well? We need these internal links to help people use these pages as an educational tool. This is why these pages also have audio and imagery. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jimmyzig0 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
What is the best strategy for linking to sub category pages?
My site is set up like this (i have x6 categories and all are similar) Home Page - Category - sub category - X4 detail pages My category page provides a summary/introduction of the subject, my sub category page is the "money page" with ability to quote & buy - my detail pages provide supporting material. What is the best internal linking strategy between these pages? (in addition, in one category i have x6 sub categories but only one of them is a "money page", should i be linking all of these pages back to the money page?) Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0