Invert canonicals?
-
Hi,
We have 2 sites, site A and site B. For now, some of our articles are duplicated on site B with rel canonicals towards site A.
Starting now, Site B will be the main site for this category, we'll only post the content on this site.
We will keep the old content on site A. But what do you think will happen if we invert the canonicals for the old articles? They would go towards site B. Would google eventually update its index, a bit like it would do for a redirect?
Thanks !
-
If you change signals, Google will pick them up. They much prefer to see change than content being incorrectly handled.
-Andy
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
-
Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Hi! As above, I wrote this article on my medium blog but am now launching my site, UnderstandingJiuJitsu.com. I have the post saved as a draft because I don't want to get pinged by google. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming the UJJ.com post is original when medium was posted first? Thanks and health, Elliott
Technical SEO | | OpenMat0 -
Old site selected as canonical on GSC 3 years after migration?
Recently my company started consulting for a SaaS company. They're clearly the best known, most trusted company on their area of work and they have the strongest brand, best product and therefore more users than any of their competitors by a big margin. Still, 99% of their traffic comes from branded, despite having 3x more domains, better performance scores and more content. Even using tools such as SimilarWeb for comparing user satisfaction metrics, they seem to have lower bounce rates and more visits per session. Still, they rank for almost nothing that is non branded on Google (they rank extremely well for almost everything on bing and DuckDuckGo). They don't have any obvious issues with crawling or indexation - we've gone to great depths to tick off any issues that could be affecting this. My conclusion is that it's either a penalty or a bug, but GSC is not flagging any manual actions. These are the things we've identified: All the content was moved from domain1.com to domain2.com at the end of 2017. 301s were put in place, migration was confirmed on GSC. Everything was done with great care and we couldn't identify any issues with it. Some subdomains of the site, especially support, rank extremely well for all sorts of keywords, even very competitive ones but the www subdomain ranks for almost nothing on Google. The www subdomain has 1,000s of domains pointing to it while the support has only a few 100s. Google is performing delayed rendering attempts on old pages, JS and CSS particularly versions of assets that were live before the migration in 2017, including the old homepage. Again, the redirects have been in place for 3 years. Search Console frequently showing old HTML (at least a year old) in cache despite a recent crawl date and a current 301. Search Console frequently processing old HTML (at least a year old) when reporting on schema. Search Console is sometimes selecting pages from the old domain as the canonical of a URL of an existing page of the current domain, despite a long-standing 301 and the canonicals being well configured for 3 years now. Has anyone experienced anything similar in the past? We've been doing an analysis of old SEO practices, link profile, disavow... nothing points to black hat practices and at this point we're wondering if it's just Google doing a terrible job with this particular domain.
Technical SEO | | oline1230 -
Canonical Url Structure Vs. Google Search View
I recently set up a new site and set the "preferred" domain in Google Webmasters to show URLs WITHOUT the WWW for google search purposes. In the confirmation email from google, this confused me: "This setting defines which host - www or not - should be considered the canonical host when indexing your site." In the website, we have cononical URLS at the top of every page in the header, but still have the WWW in those. Any issues with that?
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect
Hello, I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things: Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs. http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
Technical SEO | | Barques-Design
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0" Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown? For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat0 -
Meta data & xml sitemaps for mobile sites when using rel="canonical"/rel="alternate" annotations
When using rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" annotations between mobile and desktop sites (rel="canonical" on mobile, pointing to desktop, and rel="alternate" on desktop pointing to mobile), what are everyone's thoughts on using meta data on the mobile site? Is it necessary? And also, what is the common consensus on using a separate mobile xml sitemap?
Technical SEO | | 4Ps0 -
Canonical redirects
Hello, I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content. I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP. As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/ Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Thanks! 🙂 Eugenio0 -
Incorrect rel canonical , impacts ?
Incorrect use of canonical code.. and why have they used the strange code surrounding it. Hi there seo guys, I need some help.. a site I am working on has used the rel canonical tag incorrectly. they have used the code on the cannon page not on the duplicate pages.. there is also some other strange code with it. I will show and hide the url.. However I wanted to know if this would stop google bots crawling this page correctly as they dont seem to rank very well either.. here is the code:
Technical SEO | | ibusmedia0 -
Categories and rel canonical
Hello everyone, I have a doubt in how to approach this problem. I have a local business website, and i want to rank this website for our main KW. So the idea is to rank the main Keyword to the home page www.sitename.com At the same time we blog every week and one of the categories is the same has the main Keyword. It makes sense because the majority of the blog posts are about it. In a certain way the homepage and the category page are competing for the same keyword. How can i approach this problem? Should i use rel canonical in the category page, pointing to the homepage? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | Barbio0