Home Page Canonical Question
-
I have an online store through hosting service Volusion. I have asked them about this and was told that this is normal. I would like to confirm this with you guys because I'm not convinced of the quality of their customer service and I'm not an expert.
When I check Analytics the landing page that is visited most often is www....../default.asp and the second most visited is www........./ . These are, of course, both my home page. Volusion has radio button that allows the admin to "enable canonical links", which I have enabled, and they told me that it is normal to see this on google analytics regardless.
When I type in either of those addreses, the homepage comes up as the address that I typed. In other words it doesn't redirect so that it is always the same.
Am I right to be concerned about this?
-
The 301 Redirect in Volusion only works if the page does not exist. Since /default.asp does exist it doesn't redirect. Not sure what to do.
-
To the home page, you must choose a version and make the 301 redirect for just one option. Using canonical, the home relevance is dividing between several pages, even if google knows what the original content. To concentrate the whole relevance of the home, 301 is the best option.
-
Volusion does have the ability to do 301 redirects, so you can set that up to redirect the /default.asp to the / page. I have no experience with Volusion myself, but the following link (and a search on their site for redirects) should get you off on the right foot.
http://support.volusion.com/article/301-redirects
The 301 redirects won't affect your previous GA history, but it will help keep it straight from now on.
Do you have unique page titles for each page? If you can look at landing page by page title that may also help you work around this in an historical sense.
-
Thank you very much, that makes sense now.
-
Let me give you an example:
If there are say 3 copies of your webpage
www.domain.com; www.domain.com/index.php; www.domain.com/home.html
Ideally, you would want everyone to land on the 1st option, so here is what you could do.
Activate canonical for the url #2 and #3, in the rel=canonical tag specify the complete URL for the #1 option. That way, even if Google crawls the #2 and #3 URL, it will know that the URL that should be considered is the #1 URL.
rel=canonical does not redirect the page unlike a 302 or 301 redirection where the page is redirected to the URL you want.
-
Thank you for the quick response. I guess what I'm still not understanding is:
You said, "If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine." I am wondering- if the "enable canonical links" feature on my site is working then should I be able to type in www......./ and see www......../ and type in www.......default.asp and see www......default.asp . Shouldn't one of those be redirected so that both show the same address like www...../ for example?
-
If you have enabled canonical tag on your URL to redirect the shadow copies of your webpage to 1 location, it should be fine. In the long run however, you should think about getting a 301 redirect to your homepage URL for the URLs that are shadow copies.
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 Internal Search pages as Landing Pages?
Hi all Just a general discussion question about Internal Search pages and using them for SEO. I've been looking to "noindexing / follow" them, but a lot of the Search pages are actually driving significant traffic & revenue. I've over 9,000 search pages indexed that I was going to remove, but after reading this article (https://www.oncrawl.com/technical-seo/seo-internal-search-results/) I was wondering if any of you guys have had success using these pages for SEO, like with using auto-generated content. Or any success stories about using the "noindexing / follow"" too. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin0 -
Canonical Advice - ?
Hi everyone, I have a bit of problem with duplicate content on a newly launched site and looking for some advice on which pages to canonicalize. Our legacy site had product "information" pages that now 301 to new product information pages. The reason for the legacy having these pages (instead of pages where you can purchase) is because we used our vendors "cart link", which was an iframe inside the website. So in order to get ranked for these products, we created these pages, that had links to the frame where they could buy. The strategy worked, and we got ranked for our products. Now with the new site, we have those same product information pages, but when you click the link to buy, it goes to a page which now is on our actual site, where you can make the purchase, but this page contains the same basic information, though it looks very different. So my question --- the product "information" pages, are the new 301 homes and are the pages with the rank. The purchase pages are new and have no rank, but are essentially duplicate content. Should I put the canonical link element on the purchase page and tell Google to regard the information pages since those are ranked? It just seems weird to me to direct Google away from the place where people can purchase, however, the purchase pages aren't nearly as "pretty" as the information pages are, and wouldn't be the greatest landing pages. We have an automotive site, and the purchase page you have to enter vehicle information. The information page is nicer, and if the visitor is interested, its just one click to get to that page to buy. What to do here? I am fairly new to Moz, and I couldn't determine whether I am permitted to include an example link from our site of what I am referring to. Is that permitted? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | yogitrout1
Kristin0 -
Questions about Redirects
Hi, I am trying to make sure that I can determine if a site has a 301 redirect set up to redirect the site from domain.com to www.domain.com and am hoping that you can confirm the following for me, or let me know if I am off track: is http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ a reliable way to check if a 301 redirect is set up? is Screaming Frog SEO Spider a good tool to use to see if a redirect is in place? if I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com, I should only get results for the site being indexed, not for the site that has the 301 redirect set up, right? For example, if www.domain.com is set up to redirect to domain.com, then I should get no search results for site:www.domain.com and only show indexed pages for domain.com. If I search for site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com and get results for both, then does this mean that the redirect is not set up? if a redirect is set up from www.domain.com to domain.com, should the crawl report should only show one page crawled on www.domain.com? if a crawl report shows same number of pages for www.domain.com as for domain.com, does that mean that redirect is not set up properly? Thanks in advance for your help! Carolina
Technical SEO | | csmm0 -
Summarize your question.Sitemap blocking or not blocking that is the question?
Hi from wet & overcast wetherby UK 😞 Ones question is this... " Is the sitemap plus boxes blocking bots ie they cant pass on this page http://www.langleys.com/Site-Map.aspx " Its just the + boxes that concern me, i remeber reading somewherte javascript nav can be toxic. Is there a way to test javascript nav set ups and see if they block bots or not? Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Top pages give " page not found"
A lot of my top pages point to images in a gallery on my site. When I click on the url under the name of the jpg file I get an error page not found. For instance this link: http://www.fastingfotografie.nl/architectuur-landschap/single-gallery/10162327 Is this a problem? Thanks. Thomas. JkLej.png
Technical SEO | | thomasfasting0 -
Question Concerning Pages With Too Many Links:
I have run SEO moz software for a clients site, Its showing that virtually every single page has too many links. For instance this url: http://www.golfthere.com/AboutUs Am I missing something? I do not see 157 links on this page.
Technical SEO | | ToddKing0 -
Canonical efficiency
Hi, I'm creating recommendations for one of my client's site. It's a news site highly based on a regional aspect. One of the main features would be that you can navigate on a high level, we call it inter-regional (with all the regions news) and on the regional level (with only news related to the region) which act as a filter which means that most of my content will be duplicate. To allow the user to navigate the site on the two levels means that all the news pages will be duplicated, one with the inter-regional URL and one with the regional URL. Example: http://www.sitename.com/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article http://www.sitename.com/region-name/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article The regional URL is the official one, since it has all the keywords I want, and I'm planning to have a canonical on both version with the regional URL. Is there a risk that this would affect my ranking? Any alternatives? I read that I could prevent SE to crawl inter-regional articles using my robot.txt but I'm not fond of that. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Pherogab0 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850