Canonicalized Website
-
We are new to SEO MOZ, and as we are doing our evaluation, multiple page problems have arisen. Our domain is www.moxicopy.com and www.moxicopy.com/blog.
Our blog is wordpress hosted but integrated into our site. As we ran our analytics from MOZ PRO, we got TONS of Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content warnings, over 90 each.
Most seem to come from our blog and our different products (we are an ecommerce website).
Would the canonicalization of the pages be the cause?
And couuld someone further explain exactly what canonical/canonicalization is>? I am very confused, and have a feeling that this is what has hurt our site so much in the last 2-3 weeks
-
You need to determine first, what is causing duplicate
-
is it Tags - which are causing duplicates
-
Is it like index.php file where site is getting crawled with www.moxicopy.com/blog/index.php
-
is it that a blog is accessed by 2 or more urls like with or without category :- www.moxicopy.com/blog/category/topic and www.maxicopy.com/blog/topic
You need to identify the cause, will suggest
-
Noindex to Tags
-
Apply canonical from index.php pages and category pages
Point is :- A page should be accessed by 1 url only and all other duplicate should be canonical to original url. This will lead Search Engines to not only index your site better, but even the page authority will also be highest with the main page.
-
-
Ah, WordPress. Yes, all of your duplicate title tag and duplicate content warnings are probably caused by the way that WordPress handles archives out of the box. WordPress has all of your tag archive pages, category pages, author archives, etc. set to Index. So this means one post is duplicated in a potentially infinite amount of places (depending on the number of tags on it) and every page2/page3/page4 winds up duplicating the title tag.
What works well for many is picking up a plugin like Yoast; changing the post preview setting to the snippet instead of full (That way you don't have the full post appearing on every page, only a blurb until you click through to the page where the post actually sits); set Tag Archives, Author Archives, and potentially Category Archives to NoIndex,Follow; and look into cleaning up any useless One-Off tags.
As for what Canonicalization is... in simple terms its like a redirect except for bots only. The tag lets the search engines know that you feel a page is a duplicate or a subset of another page and would like them original canon page to rank in its place and they redirect equity towards that place while leaving the page intact, visible and accessible to the general populace.
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
-
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
HTTPS website migration and internal links
Hey Moz! I read Moz's guide on migrating websites from http to https, and it seems changing all relative internal links to absolute https is recommended (we currently use relative internal links). But is doing this absolutely necessary if we will already have a redirect in our .htaccess file forcing all http pages to https? Changing all of our internal links to absolute https will be very time consuming, and I'd like to hear your thoughts as to whether it's absolutely recommended/necessary; and if so, why? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
Is my website is having enough content on it to rank?
I have less content on my website, is this okay or I need to add more content on my pages? Website is - brandstenmedia.com.au Any other suggestions for the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon0 -
A new website issue
Hello everybody,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtmaster
I have started a new website 22 days ago at the beginning of this month and i have long articles. I think this should make the site appear in search results for long tail keywords even if they are not very relevant but as you can see in the attached image from my webmaster tools the impression count has suddenly increased to 100 then significantly decreased again. Even when i cancel "filter" option. Is this normal for a 3 weeks old website? or there is something i have to check? thanks. cLMa04l.jpg0 -
Recover rankings after having a website temporally unavailable
Hello i have this website www.productosalpormayor.com and because i forgot to renew the domain it was 15 days unavailable ... it was ranking pretty well i had 4000 a month from google , but right now i have 0 ... the keywords that used to be on the first places are very far away or dont rank anymore... Is there something i can do now.?.. I need this website back to ranking because i am about to launch new products on the website. Thanks a lot, David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conexion330 -
Am I missing an issue on my website?
Are there any glaring issues that I am missing with my site? I am building links, and growing the profile but had seen a drop in rankings a couple of months ago. Is this do to a site issue or am I just missing something? www.wallybuysell.com Any help would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CKerr0 -
Looking for guidance on transferring and incorporating content from a purchased website into an existing website
One of my client’s recently purchased a competitor’s website, and we would like to transfer the content from the competitor’s website (http://www.wilson-hardness.com) to our client’s existing website (http://www.buehler.com); at the same time we want to minimize loss in keyword rankings the competitor’s website has established. The two websites work in similar fields: one measures and offers products in scientific measurement and analysis of various materials. The other website offers products that are in similar field: hardness testing equipment. Looking for suggestions on how to proceed or recommended reading on the topic. I’ve tried to do research, but haven’t found anything, so I’m not sure what to topic-names to search. Any guidance would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TopFloor0 -
What are the SEO ramifications to forwarding your website to Facebook?
I have a client who wants to forward their website traffic to a campaign on Facebook for two week. I think it's a horrible idea on so many levels, but need a solid reason why. My gut says that their Google rankings will suffer, but I can't find any research/articles that state such. Help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Axis410