Canonical Tag Question Regarding Two State Pages
-
Hi Moz Fam!
Question... we have two pages for each state. Both pages are used in our PPC campaigns. One of the two state pages is fully optimized for organic search. The page that's optimized for organic has 1,500-2,000 words, the other one has thin content. All the content is unique, nothing duplicate. We call one set of state pages that I optimized my SEO state pages, then the other ones are our PPC state pages.
Should I be setting a canonical tag to one of these pages to let Google know which one is the "master" page? (My SEO state page is the master) I've never used them, so I'm not sure what the right answer is for this.
Thanks!
-
Thank you very much! I'll apply the canonical tag to the PPC pages and leave them to stay indexed. They do rank organically for a few keywords and gets leads, so I don't want to lose that. Is the Canonical URL just the "SEO" state page URL that I'm optimizing and want it to point too?
-
Hi Lindsay,
You'll want to apply a canonical tag to the PPC pages, pointing to the equivalent SEO page as the canonical version. You may also want to apply a self-referencing canonical tag to your SEO pages - this would be a canonical tag on the page that lists that same page as the canonical version, essentially saying "this page right here is the canonical page."
Tcope25 above is correct that, if you wanted to, you could noindex your PPC landing pages - and Gaston is correct that you would want to implement either a canonical tag or a noindex tag, but not both (there should be no impact on your PPC landing pages either way, it's very common for PPC landing pages to be noindexed). If you apply the canonical tag correctly, however, you shouldn't need to noindex the PPC landing pages. I hope that helps!
-
No, noindex will not impact PPC ads.
Leaving PPC pages alone will produce a poor user experience whether found searching in google. That´s one of the reasons why i´d suggest to canonicalize all those pages into the one matching the user intent.
If your PPC pages are also in wordpress and you have advanced setting allowed (from YOAST) for your profile, then you can set the canonical URL in the bottom of the edition page. In the advanced menu.
It looks like the image attached.Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR -
Okay, will the noindex impact our PPC ads? I'm guessing not...
What if I only applied the rel=canonical tags to the SEO state pages and left the PPC pages alone? I saw that you can apply a rel=canonical tag in SEO Yoast, but I don't know how to structure it.
-
I dind say you were. Just thought needed to be clarified
-
I wasn't suggesting to include both on the same page. Thanks!
-
Please dont apply canonical and noindex on the same page. This could lead to noindexation for the latter page
-
You should have rel=canonical tags on your SEO state pages and noindex your PPC state landing pages.
-
HI Lindsay,
Yes, you should set a canonical tag to the optimized page.
Remember not to block from crawling nor noindexing those PPC (to be canonicalized) pages.Best luck!
GR
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
-
301 Redirect to Home Page or Sub-Page?
What do you think about 301 redirect of good expired domain to a sub-page instead of the home page? I'm doing this so I don't hurt my brand name. Let me know your thoughts please. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JuanWork0 -
Null Alt Image Tags vs Missing Alt Image Tags
Hi, Would it be better for organic search to have a null alt image tag programatically added to thousands of images without alt image tags or just leave them as is. The option of adding tailored alt image tags to thousands of images is not possible. Is having sitewide alt image tags really important to organic search overall or what? Right now, probably 10% of the sites images have alt img tags. A huge number of those images are pages that aren Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Different Header on Home Page vs Sub pages
Hello, I am an SEO/PPC manager for a company that does a medical detox. You can see the site in question here: http://opiates.com. My question is, I've never heard of it specifically being a problem to have a different header on the home page of the site than on the subpages, but I rarely see it either. Most sites, if i'm not mistaken, use a consistent header across most of the site. However, a person i'm working for now said that she has had other SEO's look at the site (above) and they always say that it is a big SEO problem to have a different header on the homepage than on the subpages. Any thoughts on this subject? I've never heard of this before. Thanks, Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Waismann0 -
Do you add 404 page into robot file or just add no index tag?
Hi, got different opinion on this so i wanted to double check with your comment is. We've got /404.html page and I was wondering if you would add this page to robot text so it wouldn't be indexed or would you just add no index tag? What would be the best approach? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rubix0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
Merging your google places page with google plus page.
I have a map listing showing for the keyword junk cars for cash nj. I recently created a new g+ page and requested a merge between the places and the + page. now when you do a search you see the following. Junk Cars For Cash NJ LLC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars
junkcarforcashnj.com/
Google+ page - Google+ page the first hyperlink takes me to the about page of the G+ and the second link takes me to the posts section within g+. Is this normal? should i delete the places account where the listing was originally created? Or do i leave it as is? Thanks0 -
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools. The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present? The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content? And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second? I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0