Is the full URL necessary for successful Canonical Links?
-
Hi, my first question and hopefully an easy enough one to answer.
Currently in the head element of our pages we have canonical references such as:
(Yes, untidy URL...we are working on it!)
I am just trying to find out whether this snippet of the full URL is adequete for canonicalization or if the full domain is needed aswell.
My reason for asking is that the SEOmoz On-Page Optimization grading tool is 'failing' all our pages on the "Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical" value.
I have been unable to find a definitive answer on this, although admittedly most examples do use the full URL. (I am not the site developer so cannot simply change this myself, but rather have to advise him in a weekly meeting).
So in short, presumably using the full URL is best practise, but is it essential to its effectiveness when being read by the search engines? Or could there be another reason why the "Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical" value is not being green ticked?
Thank you very much, I appreciate any advice you can give.
-
Thanks I will get the full URLs implemented to avoid any future confusions.
I can't give an exact size of the site but I know it is much larger than it should be. It seems as though our CMS has been unnecessarily producing new URLs for the same pages over and over which we are aiming to fix very soon.
-
Thank you for your fast responses!
Sorry Damien, I am at odds as to how I missed this bit of information!
In light of this, do you have any clues as to why SEOmoz on page diagnostics does not like our canonical references?
-
Thank you for your fast responses!
Sorry Damien, I am at odds as to how I missed this bit of information!
In light of this, do you have any clues as to why SEOmoz on page diagnostics does not like our canonical references?
-
Interesting that Google mentions absolute and relative urls, but they don't specifically address root relative urls (what this is, since it begins with the "/") or show it in their examples.
-
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
Part of relevance -
Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
-
If you check half way down the page it answers exactly what you're after.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
In short, it's fine
DD
..if you can't be bothered finding it:
"Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as ?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL."
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
-
Use existing page with bad URL or brand new URL?
Hello, We will be updating an existing page with more helpful information with the goal of reaching more potential customers through SEO and also attaching a SEM campaign to the specific landing page. The current URL of the page scores 25 on Page Authority, and has 2 links to it from blog articles (PA 35, 31). The current content needs to be rewritten to be more helpful and also needs some additional information. The downsides are that it has an "bad" URL- no target keyword and uses underscores. Which of the following choices would you make? 1. Update this old "bad" URL with new content. Benefit from the existing PA. -or- 2. Start with a new optimized URL, reusing some of the old content and utilizing a 301 redirect from the previous page? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | XLMarketing0 -
URL Redirect
Hi All, So we have employees who can own their own domains for business, however, one employee has a domain that links back to our main site, but when it does, the URL and Page title of our main site, still say his own domain. IE: www.johndoe.com links to www.mysite.com except the url and itle still say www.johndoe.com What are the implications of this? Thank you
Technical SEO | | PeteEllard0 -
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 !
Technical SEO | | AdrienLargus0 -
Quality links are beneficial, but are neutral links detrimental?
So obviously a link profile featuring quality / authoritative / relavant in-bound links is preferable, but here's my question: If I'm starting work on a brand new domain, should I build links that one would consider neutral (i.e. from a non-spammy, but unrelated site) or should I not bother and only focus on quality links? Thanks
Technical SEO | | underscorelive0 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0 -
How to find original URLS after Hosting Company added canonical URLs, URL rewrites and duplicate content.
We recently changed hosting companies for our ecommerce website. The hosting company added some functionality such that duplicate content and/or mirrored pages appear in the search engines. To fix this problem, the hosting company created both canonical URLs and URL rewrites. Now, we have page A (which is the original page with all the link juice) and page B (which is the new page with no link juice or SEO value). Both pages have the same content, with different URLs. I understand that a canonical URL is the way to tell the search engines which page is the preferred page in cases of duplicate content and mirrored pages. I also understand that canonical URLs tell the search engine that page B is a copy of page A, but page A is the preferred page to index. The problem we now face is that the hosting company made page A a copy of page B, rather than the other way around. But page A is the original page with the seo value and link juice, while page B is the new page with no value. As a result, the search engines are now prioritizing the newly created page over the original one. I believe the solution is to reverse this and make it so that page B (the new page) is a copy of page A (the original page). Now, I would simply need to put the original URL as the canonical URL for the duplicate pages. The problem is, with all the rewrites and changes in functionality, I no longer know which URLs have the backlinks that are creating this SEO value. I figure if I can find the back links to the original page, then I can find out the original web address of the original pages. My question is, how can I search for back links on the web in such a way that I can figure out the URL that all of these back links are pointing to in order to make that URL the canonical URL for all the new, duplicate pages.
Technical SEO | | CABLES0 -
Link Juice
When we say "link juice", does it mean that a particular page has link juice ( due to backlinks pointing towards the page ) or each link on that page has link juice which it passes to the target page I suppose "link juice " is different from Pagerank ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Changing url structure
We are an ecommerce site established in 2005 and currently have some great rankings. We are about to move away from our existing platform, actinic and move on to Magento. This will change all our url's. What are the steps we should be asking our web developers to follow in order to minimize the consequences of moving? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | LadyApollo0