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.
Canonical or hreflang?
-
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like:
or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site?
I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
-
Hello!
I found one amazing article about Canonicals and Hreflangs for International Store. It might be helpful. -
I feel like my question isn't being understood here.
I understand the difference between the two and if the sites were for example English and Spanish I would get which to use, but the hreflang tag sub-divides languages into individual regional variants, in my case en-GB, en-IE, en-AU and en-NZ.
So, my question is which to use when the "base" language is the same, so in all essence, the article is basically identical, with the odd regional spelling variation, e.g. colour and color, tossed in?
-
Canonical tags are used to signal the official version of a URL whereas hreflang tags are used to match the correct piece of content to region-specific users speaking another language. However, it's important to remember that the hreflang attribute and canonical tags are just signals or hints and are not directives.
-
In this case I'll choose Hreflang because work in differents languages.
-
So, you are saying to use both which seems to be contrary to all the articles I've read about this, which seem to suggest you should only use one or the other, but never really talk about this particular scenario.
-
you canoncial every page by defualt and hreflang it
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
-
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?0 -
Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical
Hi all, A number of our pages have dropped out of search rankings. It seems they are being marked as "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical" However, the page Google is choosing as the canonical is totally different - different headings, titles, metadata, content on the page. We are completely mystified as to why this is happening. If anyone can shed any light, it would be hugely appreciated! Example URL is this one:
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/london Which Google seems to think is a duplicate of this: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/solicitor/london0 -
Does Google read dynamic canonical tags?
Does Google recognize rel=canonical tag if loaded dynamically via javascript? Here's what we're using to load: <script> //Inject canonical link into page head if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname1") != -1) { canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/kapiolani", ""); } if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname2") != -1) { canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/straub", ""); } if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname3") != -1) { canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/pali-momi", ""); } if (window.location.href.indexOf("/subdirname4") != -1) { canonicalLink = window.location.href.replace("/wilcox", ""); } if (canonicalLink != window.location.href) { var link = document.createElement('link'); link.rel = 'canonical'; link.href = canonicalLink; document.head.appendChild(link); } script>
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
Rel Canonical, Follow/No Follow in htaccess?
Very quick question, are rel canonical, follow/no follow tags, etc. written in the htaccess file?
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Custom hreflang tags in WP & using with Yoast
Hi My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as: "Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code" Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ? Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ? Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below: _One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
_you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
_add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
sorted. _But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
_using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
_Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
what you think is best. So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ? Cheers dan0 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050