Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
-
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
-
I would just title them according to their view type. Try to put your most informative words as close to the front as possible so that it's easy to read in browser tabs, for example: Red Widgets, All Widgets, <$25 Widgets... etc. Meta description could probably be a repeat of the title tag. Make the title as UX friendly as possible.
-
- What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
Yes, I would not put them in the sitemap. Main goal of a sitemap is to make it easier for bots to discover the different pages of the site. The pages that have a canonical url pointing to another page don't really need this, as you don't want the search engines to index them anyway.
-
Since my preference is always to have people land on the page with thumbnails that is what I was thinking but wanted to double check. Thank you.
-
Based on how you're describing it, I'd leave them out of the sitemap.
-
These pages will be almost identical. They are category pages for ecommerce and the only difference is it will display all items and there will be no thumbnails. It sounds like you are saying not to put them in the sitemap in this instance?
-
They are category pages for an ecommerce site. Currently we list the items 25 to a page with a thumbnail. The second view will be all of the items in a basic list view with no thumbnails. We have some categories with several hundred items and our users have requested a way to see them all on one page.
-
Hi,
Agree with the arguments of Ryan on the whether or not to put the canonical.
However, if you decide that these pages are almost identical, and that you will use a canonical, it has no use to put all the variations of these pages in the sitemap. However, you should add the canonical version to the sitemap.
It's not a big problem if these pages are in the sitemap, you'll just notice it webmaster tools a low % of indexed pages for this sitemap.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Are the different views going to be substantially different pages or a reordering of products seen throughout each view? If the latter is the case I wouldn't use rel="canonical" for each view. If the pages are substantially different, like one is just displaying widgets, while the other is displaying widget maintenance tools, the having each of those pages as categorical sections to your store is worth it and worth being in the sitemap.
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
-
Will google merge structured data from two pages if they have the same canonical?
Will google merge structured data from two pages if they have the same canonical? The crawler should be able to get to the tab through an ahref. The tab in question is "Cast & Crew." Thank you in advance for any insight! szmOmj8.jpg uM8qUfi.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | catbur0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
How to 301 Redirect /page.php to /page, after a RewriteRule has already made /page.php accessible by /page (Getting errors)
A site has its URLs with php extensions, like this: example.com/page.php I used the following rewrite to remove the extension so that the page can now be accessed from example.com/page RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.php -f
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rcseo
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.php [L] It works great. I can access it via the example.com/page URL. However, the problem is the page can still be accessed from example.com/page.php. Because I have external links going to the page, I want to 301 redirect example.com/page.php to example.com/page. I've tried this a couple of ways but I get redirect loops or 500 internal server errors. Is there a way to have both? Remove the extension and 301 the .php to no extension? By the way, if it matters, page.php is an actual file in the root directory (not created through another rewrite or URI routing). I'm hoping I can do this, and not just throw a example.com/page canonical tag on the page. Thanks!0 -
"near me" campaign
I'm looking at running a campaign to get a site ranking for terms that include "near me" so for instance, "personal trainers near me", "yoga lessons near me" I'm wondering if this should be a local campaign because of the the "near me" in the term and Google basing results on IP addresses of the searcher (if that's possible possible instead of town names) or will it come down to words on the page including "near me" Any help or examples would be hugely appreciated, thanks community!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Better UX or more Dedicated Pages (and page views)?
Hi, I'm building a new e-commerce site and I'm conflicting about what to do in my category pages. If we take for example a computer store.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I have a category of laptops and inside there are filters by brand (Samsung, HP, etc.). I have two options - either having the brand choice open a new dedicated page -
i.e. Samsung-Laptops.aspx or simply do a JQuery filter which gives a better and faster user experience (immediate, animated and with no refresh). **Which should I use? (or does it depend on the keyword it might target)? **
Samsung laptops / dell laptops / hp laptops - are a great keyword on there own! By the way, splitting Laptops.aspx to many sub category physical pages might also help by providing the site with many actual pages dealing with laptops altogether.0 -
Category Pages up - Product Pages down... what would help?
Hi I mentioned yesterday how one of our sites was losing rank on product pages. What steps do you take to improve the SERPS of product pages, in this case home/category/product is the tree. There isn't really any internal linking, except one link from the category page to each product, would setting up a host of internal links perhaps "similar products" linking them together be a place to start? How can I improve my ranking of these more deeply internal pages? Not just internal links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Too many on page links - product pages
Some of the pages on my client's website have too many on page links because they have lists of all their products. Is there anything I should/could do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Old pages still crawled by SE returning 404s. Better to put 301 or block with robots.txt ?
Hello guys, A client of ours has thousand of pages returning 404 visibile on googl webmaster tools. These are all old pages which don't exist anymore but Google keeps on detecting them. These pages belong to sections of the site which don't exist anymore. They are not linked externally and didn't provide much value even when they existed What do u suggest us to do: (a) do nothing (b) redirect all these URL/folders to the homepage through a 301 (c) block these pages through the robots.txt. Are we inappropriately using part of the crawling budget set by Search Engines by not doing anything ? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | H-FARM0