Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links

    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.

    Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    6
    3073
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • jorgediaz
      jorgediaz last edited by

      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!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • KT684
        KT684 last edited by

        Hey Jorgediaz, first off I think it would be wise to add the canonical tags specifying the primary URL for all of your pages, additionally it wouldn't hurt to add the parameter in question to your Google webmasters tool letting Google know to ignore your affiliate parameters.  You can find that in the Site Configuration settings under the 'parameter handling' tab.

        I personally woudln't worry too much about the 'loss of link juice' since I think what Matt Cutts is talking about is more duplicate content that results from shopping carts that might serve up a very similar page based on a filter (such as re-ordering products by price).  In my experience affiliate links aren't the greatest in the first place, many are probably even using your publisher ID sending the link to an intermediary source for tracking purposes, so to recap, if it were me I'd add the canonical, add the parameter in your webmaster tools and leave it at that.

        Hope this helps.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • GeorgeDavis
          GeorgeDavis @jorgediaz last edited by

          How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content
          We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience.

          1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.

          2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.

          _3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL._Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.

          If you find you have duplicate content as mentioned above, can you help search engines understand your site?
          First, no worries, there are many sites on the web that utilize URL parameters and for valid reasons. But yes, you can help reduce potential problems for search engines by:

          1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters -- keep the URL as clean as possible.

          2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap's URL in search results, it's helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

          Source

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • jorgediaz
            jorgediaz @adrianvender1 last edited by

            But are we losing link juice without using the canonical tags right now?

            GeorgeDavis 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • GeorgeDavis
              GeorgeDavis last edited by

              Hi Jorge,

              If I am not mistaken the /product-page would receive link juice for the links with ?afl=XXXXXX at the end.  No need to worry.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • adrianvender1
                adrianvender1 last edited by

                You can use the canonical URL tag (i.e. rel="canonical") to instruct the search engines what the primary URL should be and avoid any duplicate content issues. You can also setup query parameter exclusions with the different search engine webmaster tools to instruct them to ignore these affiliate query parameters.

                Regarding link juice, there is a video from Matt Cutts that suggests that there may a fractional loss of link juice with Canonical URL references, but nothing to be worried about.  So to answer your question, you will still have link juice passed when using the canonical URL tag.

                watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

                jorgediaz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • TinoSharp

                  Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain

                  I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp
                  0
                • ColesNathan

                  Is it best practice to have a canonical tags on all pages

                  The website I'm working on has no canonical tags. There is duplicate content so rel=canonicals need adding to certain pages but is it best practice to have a tag on every page ?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ColesNathan
                  0
                • vtmoz

                  Top hierarchy pages vs footer links vs header links

                  Hi All, We want to change some of the linking structure on our website. I think we are repeating some non-important pages at footer menu. So I want to move them as second hierarchy level pages and bring some important pages at footer menu. But I have confusion which pages will get more influence: Top menu or bottom menu or normal pages? What is the best place to link non-important pages; so the link juice will not get diluted by passing through these. And what is the right place for "keyword-pages" which must influence our rankings for such keywords? Again one thing to notice here is we cannot highlight pages which are created in keyword perspective in top menu. Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz
                  0
                • muzzmoz

                  How (or if) to apply re canonical tags to Shopify?

                  Anyone familiar with Shopify will understand the problems of their directory structure. Every time you add a product to a 'collection' it essentially creates a duplicate. For example... https://www.domain.com/products/product-slim-regular-bikini may also appear as: https://www.domain.com/collections/all/products/product-slim-regular-bikini https://www.domain.com/collections/new-arrivals/products/product-slim-regular-bikini https://www.domain.com/collections/bikinis/products/product-slim-regular-bikini etc, etc It's not uncommon to have up to six duplicates of each product. So my question is twofold: Firstly, should I worry about this from an SEO point of view? I understand the desire to minimise potential duplicate content issues and also in focussing the 'juice' on just one page per product. But I also planned on trying to build the authority of the collection pages. If I request Google not to index the product pages which link off the collections, does this not devalue these collections pages? Secondly, I understand the correct way to fix these is using 'rel canonical' tags, but I'm not clear about HOW to actually do this. Shopify support has not been very helpful. They have provided two different instructions, so just added to the confusion (see below). Shopify instruction #1: Add the following to the theme.liquid file... <title><br />{{ page_title }}{% if current_tags %} – tagged "{{ current_tags | join: ', ' }}"{% endif %}{% if current_page != 1 %} – Page {{ current_page }}{% endif %}{% unless page_title contains shop.name %} – {{ shop.name }}{% endunless %}<br /></title>
                  {% if page_description %} {% endif %} Shopify instruction #2: Add the following to each individual product page... So, can anyone help clarify: The best strategic approach to this inherent SEO issue with Shopify (besides moving to another platform!)? and If 'rel canonical' tags is the way to go, exactly where and how to apply them? Regards, Murray

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz
                  1
                • moon-boots

                  How to add Canonical Tags on Opencart Products

                  Does anyone know how to add canonical tags to product pages in Opencart? Is this possible to do in htaccess? If so, how specifically should it be written in? Please do not post any links to other pages which reference generic canonical information as I've read them all and none help. I'm looking for an Opencart specific answer, or a way to do it in htaccess.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots
                  0
                • blankslatedumbo

                  Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**

                  I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo
                  0
                • luxresorts

                  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 | | luxresorts
                  0
                • WebRiverGroup

                  Should canonical links be included or excluded in a sitemap?

                  Our company is in the process of updating our sitemap. Should we include or exclude canonical links.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.