What canonical makes sense in this particular situation?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am running into a situation where I am not sure what would be the canonical best practice.
I am working on an e-commerce site (magento)
Situation 1 :
site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/
Situation 2:
if site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ wouldn't it make sense to have site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ (situation1) canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ instead of site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ ? and if I am right would it hurt to have both situations 1 and 2 combined?
Thanks Guys!
-
Thank you Guys!
-
If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.
www.site.com = canonical
the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'
-
Hi,
You should avoid URL canonicalization chains just like you avoid redirect chains. If URL1, URL2, URL3 contain substantially similar or identical content and if you choose URL1 to be the canonical/preferred one then here is what you should ideally be doing:
URL 2 --> Canonicalized to URL1
URL 3 --> Canonicalized to URL1 and not to URL2
In this case, only URL1 will be in Google's index. Here you go for more:
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Check out point 9.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Anything make sense if it make sense.
The only rule is what make sense from a duplicate content perspective. And you are not limited to rules based on category tree sub levels.
Just think about the content of each category (or family/group of categories) and what make sense to have in google index. What should go in google index is the target of the canonicalization, what doesn't matter to have in the index (because duplicate, because of ridiculous potential traffic, etc...) should have the meta canonical tag pointing to the canonical url. That's all.
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
-
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
How to correct a google canonical issue?
So when I initially launched my website I had an issue where I didn't properly set my canonical tags and all my pages got crawled. Now in looking at the search engine results I see a number of the pages that were meant to be canonical tagged to the correct page showing up in the results. What is the best way to correct this issue with google? Also I noticed that while initially I was ranking well for the main pages, now those results have disappeared entirely and deeper in the rankings I am finding the pages that were meant to be canonical tagged. Please Help.
Technical SEO | | jackaveli0 -
Which is the best way of make text bold?
Is there a difference between , and font-weight: bold, in terms of SEO weighting? Does font size make a diffence, relative to the average font size of the page?
Technical SEO | | soltec0 -
301 or Rel=canonical
Should I use a 301 redirect for redirect mywebsite.com to www.mywebsite.com or use a rel=canonical?? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeslieVS0 -
Is having "rel=canonical" on the same page it is pointing to going to hurt search?
i like the rel=canonical tag and i've seen matt cutts posts on google about this tag. for the site i'm working on, it's a great workaround because we often have two identical or nearly identical versions of pages: 1 for patients, 1 for doctors. the problem is this: the way our content management system is set up, certain pages are linked up in a number of places and when we publish, two different versions of the page are created, but same content. because they are both being made from the same content templates, if i put in the rel=canonical tag, both pages get it. so, if i have: http://www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp and http://www.myhospital.com/professional-condition.asp and they are both produced from the same template, and have the same content, and i'm trying to point search at http://www.myhospital.com/patient-condition.asp, but that tag appears on both pages similarly, we have various forms and we like to know where people are coming from on the site to use those forms. to the bots, it looks like there's 600 versions of particular pages, so again, rel=canonical is great. however, because it's actually all the same page, just a link with a variable tacked on (http://www.myhospital.com/makeanappointment.asp?id=211) the rel=canonical tag will appear on "all" of them. any insight is most appreciated! thanks! brett
Technical SEO | | brett_hss0 -
Canonical for stupid _GET parameters or not? [deep technical details]
Hi, Im currently working on www.kupwakacje.pl which is something like travel agency. People can search for holidays and buy/reserve them. I do know plenty of problems on my website, and thx to seomoz hopefully I will be able to fix them but one is crucial and it's kind of hard to fix I think. The search engine is provided by external party in form of simple API which is in the end responding with formatted HTML - which is completly stupid and pointless, but that's not the main problem. Let's dive in: So for example the visitor goes to homepage, selects Egypt and hit search button. He will be redirected to www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt/?ep3[]=%3Fsp%3D3%26a%3D2%26kt%3D%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26drt%3D30%26drf%3D0%26px and this is not a joke 😉 'wczasy-egipt' is my invention obviously and it means 'holidays-egypt'. I've tried to at least have 'something' in the url that makes google think it's related to Egypt indeed. Rest which is the complicated ep3[] thingy is a bunch of encoded parameters. This thing renders in first step a list of hotels, in next one hotel specific offer and in next one the reservation page. Problem is that all those links generated by this so-called API are only changing subparameters in ep3[] parameter so for example clicking on a single hotel changes to url to: www.kupwakacje.p/wczasy-egipt/?url=wczasy-egipt/&ep3[]=%3Fsid%3Db5onrj4hdnspb5eku4s2iqm1g3lomq91%26l ang%3Dpl%26drt%3D30%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26ed%3D30.12.1999%26px%3D99999 %26dsr%3D11%253A%26ds%3D11%253A%26sp%3D which is obviously looking not very different to the first one. what I would like to know is shall i make all pages starting with 'wczasy-egipt' a rel-canonical to the first one (www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt) or shoudn't I? google recognizes the webpage according to webmasters central, and recognizes the url but responses with mass duplicate content. What about positioning my website for the hotel names - so long tail optimalization? I know it's a long and complicated post, thx for reading and I would be very happy with any tip or response.
Technical SEO | | macic0 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0 -
Canonical tags and internal Google search
Quick question: I want some pages that will have canonical tags, to show up in internal results for a Google site search that's built into the site. I'm not finished with the site, but is it correct to assume that pages with canonical will NOT show up in internal site search results, when powered by Google?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0