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.
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!
-
Thank you for you responses and advice!
-
Very nice addition John.
-
Ryan, spot on as always.
One other thing, it sounds like some of the canonicals you're placing on pages would be better suited to 301 redirects, like correcting a URL for not having a trailing slash or not. If you can avoid using canonicals and use 301 redirects instead, that's the preferred method for resolving duplicate content issues. Canonicals are more for when there are parameters on the URLs, and you can't get away from serving the pages with those parameters.
-
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 first thing to understand is the canonical tag is a suggestion, not an order. While a search engine will usually honor the canonical tag, there are instances where Google or other SEs may determine the canonical tag is not being used correctly so they disregard the canonical tag. Based on this understanding, yes the robot will read the entire page regardless of the canonical tag status.
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?
The two tags you mention conflict. You would never use both tags on the same page.
Noindex means you do not wish the page to appear in the search index. The canonical tag means you do wish the content to be included in the search index, but use the canonical URL in the index.
if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order?
The order of meta tags does not matter. If a page was marked with both a canonical tag and a noindex tag, the noindex tag would take effect and the page would not be indexed, so the canonical tag would not have any effect.
In short, you want to use the canonical tag to resolve duplicate content issues, not the noindex tag.
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
-
Fast/Easy Way to Implement Canonical tags in Bulk in Magento CMS?
Hello Amazing SEO Community! Quick Q for a client with a TON of duplicate content. (yikes!) My client is currently undertaking a large SEO project around canonical tagging for their thousands of duplicate pages. Currently, one product sits on multiple URLs and they are being indexed as different pages (with the same content). The issue is found across all products and other pages, and across their international sites as well. One core challenge they face now is lack of time/resources from their developer side. The solution we see to the duplicate content is to manually add a canonical tag to each of our tens of thousands of pages. Their content management system is Magento. Has anyone ever tackled canonicalization for a large site that uses Magento? Any more efficient solutions to manual tagging is ideal. Thanks in advance for your input. -Bonnie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
H2 Tags- Can you have more than 1 H2 tag
Hi All, Screaming frog has identified that we have a few H2 tags on our pages , although we only have 1 H1 tag. We have numerous H3,H4's etc. I am wondering, is it good SEO to have only 1 H2 tag like with H1 tag or can you have more ? thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Does a UTM tag influence the linkvalue?
Will Google value a link with a UTM tag the same as a clean link without a UTM tag? I should say that a UTM tag link is not a natural link so the linkvalue is zero. Anyone any idea how to look at this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TT_Vakantiehuizen0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country?
A customer of ours has a website in Belgium. There two main languages in Belgium: Dutch and French.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox
At first there was only a Dutch version with a .be extension. Right now they are implementing the French Belgium version on the URL website.be/fr. All of the content and comments will be translated. Also the URL’s will change from Dutch to French, so you've got two URL’s with the same content but in another language. Question: Should you use a canonical tag on translated content in a multi-language country? I think Google will understand this is just for the usability for a Multilanguage country. What do you guys think???0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0