Canonical tag question
-
Suppose a site has two pages ( Page A ) and Page B. Both of them have pagerank, but duplicate content.
The page A is ranked for keyword "seo india" and page B is ranked for keyword "seo services".
If i implement canonical tag on page B, does
1. The pagerank of page B will be transfered to Page A ?
2. Does the site A now ranks for keyword "seo servicies " ( for which Page B was ranking earlier )
-
Google views the canonical tag as a hint, and reserves the right to ignore it if the pages don't look to be virtually identical in content, so it would depend in part on how much of the content is duplicate. If it's your own site, you can always give it a try and see. If it's a client site and they're depending on both pages ranking for conversions, I'd warn them first that you might lose the rankings from Page B.
-
I would agree with Stephen on point 1, but would throw the following thoughts in on point 2:
For example:
page A is mysite.com/seo-india
page B is mysite.com/seo-services
I would guess that there would be a minor difference in ranking impact on a couple of counts with respect to what phrase is ranked for in each case - despite having the same content.
Things to consider would be the url itself, the page title, the H1 and the metadescription.
I can't see that using a canon from one page to another will migrate additional ranking terms to the destination page in its own right - if you have links to page B with anchors that reflect the terms it might - but how long you would continue to rank for the additional term would be questionable.
If it was that simple to get the same page to rank for multiple terms just by duplicating content, linking to it, and then redirecting with the canon tag - I am sure google would get wise to that pretty quick, and there would be no end of "top secret ranking" mails doing the rounds from "SEO gurus"
Would be interesting to test though!
-
I am not sure if there is just a simple yes or no answer to your questions. It is hard to predict exactly to what the search engines will do and ranking will change.
1. It looks like the answer to this question is Yes. Here is a snippet for a Google Webmaster Blog article.
Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
2. I can only assume the answer to this question would be yes too. I would assume that since both pages are identical and are on the same domain, page A would now rank the same as page B. It is hard to know for sure though. Sorry I can't be more definitive but Google is a complex animal.
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
-
Canonicals Passing Link Juice?
After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation. We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone. No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google. But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all. A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users. We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google. We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers. I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles. People can comment there as well if they like. Are there any potential downsides to doing this? My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HLTalk1 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Backlinking from a Canonical Page to the Non-Canonical Doman - Wrong Signals?
Hi Mozzers, Let's say you have www.mysite.com/page, which is a duplicate of www.yoursite.com/page. www.yousite.com/page has a rel canonical link identifying www.mysite.com/page as the original source. www.mysite.com/page has a followed backlink going towards www.yousite.com/home-page. mysite.com has a DA of 44
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
yoursite.com has a DA of 33 Google has chosen to index www.yoursite.com/page instead of www.mysite.com/page. Is the followed backlink responsible for the wrong page being indexed? Thanks!0 -
Infographic question
I am about to post my first Infographic and have a question. The graphic is fairly long and was wondering, is it better to split this graphic up in to chunks? So that it loads in stages? I am new to this and would be great if someone could point me to the latest and best practices for infographics. I have seen a few articles but they appear to be old. Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
Questions about 301 Redirects
I have about 10 - 15 URLs that are redirecting to http://www.domainname.comwww.domainname.com/. (which is an invalid URL)The website is on a Joomla platform. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I can't figure out where the problem is coming from.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnParker27920 -
Canonical Tag - Question
Hey, I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly. The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine. My questions are: Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com? Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys... If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different). Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
Canonical Problems
Hi Guys, There is so much info out there about canonical issues and 301 redirects I'm not sure what to do about my problem. Google webmaster says I have over 2000 duplicate page titles. Google is showing most of my pages in duplicate or triplicate url format. Example: /store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE//store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE/store/love_oil_caribbean_rose/Im using x-cart pro as my cart.When I look at the source code I see each one having a rel=canonical tag with the exact urls you see above. Can someone give me an example of a redirect that I can put in my .htaccess file that would work site wide?I obviously cant go through and 301 this on a page by page basis. It would take a year.Thank You Tim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fasctimseo0