Canonical for stupid _GET parameters or not? [deep technical details]
-
Hi,
Im currently working on www.kupwakacje.pl which is something like travel agency. People can search for holidays and buy/reserve them. I do know plenty of problems on my website, and thx to seomoz hopefully I will be able to fix them but one is crucial and it's kind of hard to fix I think. The search engine is provided by external party in form of simple API which is in the end responding with formatted HTML - which is completly stupid and pointless, but that's not the main problem. Let's dive in:
So for example the visitor goes to homepage, selects Egypt and hit search button. He will be redirected to
and this is not a joke
'wczasy-egipt' is my invention obviously and it means 'holidays-egypt'. I've tried to at least have 'something' in the url that makes google think it's related to Egypt indeed. Rest which is the complicated ep3[] thingy is a bunch of encoded parameters. This thing renders in first step a list of hotels, in next one hotel specific offer and in next one the reservation page. Problem is that all those links generated by this so-called API are only changing subparameters in ep3[] parameter so for example clicking on a single hotel changes to url to:
www.kupwakacje.p/wczasy-egipt/?url=wczasy-egipt/&ep3[]=%3Fsid%3Db5onrj4hdnspb5eku4s2iqm1g3lomq91%26l ang%3Dpl%26drt%3D30%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26ed%3D30.12.1999%26px%3D99999 %26dsr%3D11%253A%26ds%3D11%253A%26sp%3D
which is obviously looking not very different to the first one. what I would like to know is shall i make all pages starting with 'wczasy-egipt' a rel-canonical to the first one (www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt) or shoudn't I? google recognizes the webpage according to webmasters central, and recognizes the url but responses with mass duplicate content. What about positioning my website for the hotel names - so long tail optimalization?
I know it's a long and complicated post, thx for reading and I would be very happy with any tip or response.
-
Also, here's a blog post from SEOmoz discussing the idea of Google, internal search results pages, and thin content: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
"Google has often taken a dim view of internal search results (sometimes called “search within search”, although that term has also been applied to Google’s direct internal search boxes). Essentially, they don’t want people to jump from their search results to yours – they want search users to reach specific, actionable information.
While Google certainly has their own self-interest in mind in some of these cases, it’s true that internal search can create tons of near duplicates, once you tie in filters, sorts, and pagination. It’s also arguable that these pages create a poor search experience for Google users.
The Solution
This can be a tricky situation. On the one hand, if you have clear conceptual duplicates, like search sorts, you should consider blocking or NOINDEXing them. Having the ascending and descending version of a search page in the Google index is almost always low value.
Likewise, filters and tags can often create low-value paths to near duplicates.
Search pagination is a difficult issue and beyond the scope of this post, although I’m often in favor of NOINDEXing pages 2+ of search results. They tend to convert poorly and often look like duplicates." -
Yeah, the iframe idea seems to be the easiest to implement and would give you a nice amount of control over both the URLs and the content on the pages. Generally Google tries to avoid indexing other sites' internal search results pages, so if you can add content around the iframe that helps make those search pages unique, that will help.
-
ok, will try all of these advices to be honest. I'm 99% sure I can't do much about the GET parameters, but will check.
Second thing which is making some kind of static pages and linking them with an iframe response seems really nice idea and is definetely doable. I will dive into that.
Third one is the most obvious one but I doubt I will manage to do it (even though I'm really not a bad developer ;)) there are about 30 parameters which need to be rewritten probably. It might be a better idea just to overwrite a few main ones (like which step user is at, which direction, which hotel etc). But can apache decode javascript?
hmm..
Thx for answers so far!
-
First, I'd look for a way to shorten the URL via the API. There are a TON of blank variables in that URL so I'm guessing the API has everything turned on, even though you're not pulling results for all those variables. If you can, get it to return data on only the things being searched for.
Next, if the API is just too unmanageable, I'd look into building static pages that pull search results into them via an iFrame. That way you could control all the URLs and content for several hundred popular searches, have nice clean URLs, but still have the dynamic search results as a portion of the page.
A last option, if possible, would be to setup URL rewrites to change the popular searches into normal sounding pages, but that could be difficult and cause things to break if the API changes suddenly or throws more random variables into the mix.
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
-
Sitemap and canonical
In my sitemap I have two entries for my page ContactUs.asp ContactUs.asp?Lng=E ContactUs.asp?Lng=F What should I use in my page ContactUS.asp ? Is this correct?
Technical SEO | | CustomPuck0 -
Google selecting incorrect URL as canonical: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical'
Hi there, A number of our URLs are being de-indexed by Google. When looking into this using Google Search Console the same message is appearing on multiple pages across our sites: 'Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical' 'IndexingIndexing allowed? YesUser-declared canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/ie/products/real-estate-financial-software/Google-selected canonical - https://www.mrisoftware.com/uk/products/real-estate-financial-software/'Has anyone else experienced this problem?How can I get Google to select the correct, user-declared canoncial? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nfrank0 -
Google Search Console and User-declared canonical is actually Hreflang tag
Hey, We recently launched a US version of UK based ecommerce website on the us.example.com subdomain. Both websites are on Shopify so canonical tags are handled automatically and we have implemented Hreflang tags across both websites. Suddenly our rankings in the UK have dropped and after looking in search console for the UK site ive found that a lot of pages are now no longer indexed in Google because the User-declared canonical is the Hreflang tag for the US URL. Below is an example https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet - is the product page is the canonical tag rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb" /> - UK hreflang tag rel="alternate" href="https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us" /> - US Hreflang tag then in Google search console the user-defined canonical is https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet but it should be https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet The UK website has been assigned to target the United Kingdom in Search Console and the US website has been assigned to target the United States. We also do not have access to robots.txt file unfortunately. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | PeterRubber0 -
Canonical
i have some static webpages in root and wordpress installed in subdirectory , Canonical tag for the whole website was with trailing slash , i stripped the HTML extensions for static webpages but i can't force to add trailing slash to the static webpages so i changed the canonical for html webpages from http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html/ to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles but the Wordpress" http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/ " still with trailing slash , when i've checked my google webmasters i found that my indexed pages dropped down 100 page ! what should i put in the canonical for the static pages? i tried to strip the slash from wordpress but i failed , so my static webpages canonical with no trailing slash and wordpress with trailing slash .
Technical SEO | | NeatIT0 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Adding Rel Canonical to multiple pages
Hi, Our CMS generates a lot of duplicate content, (Different versions of every page for 3 different font sizes). There are many other reasons why we should drop this current CMS and go with something else, and we are in the process of doing that. But for now, does anyone know how would I do the following: I've created a spreadsheet that contains the following: Column 1: rel="canonical" tag for URL Column 2: Duplicate Content URL # 1 Column 3: Duplicate Content URL # 2 Column 4: Duplicate Content URL # 3 I want to add the tag from column 1 into the head of every page from column 2,3, and 4. What would be a fast way to do this considering that I have around 1800 rows. Check the screenshot of the builtwith.com result to see more information about the website if that helps. Farris bxySL
Technical SEO | | jdossetti0 -
Will rel=canonical cause a page to be indexed?
Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content: One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.) http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
Technical SEO | | jgower0 -
REL Canonical Error
In my crawl diagnostics it showing a Rel=Canonical error on almost every page. I'm using wordpress. Is there a default wordpress problem that would cause this?
Technical SEO | | mmaes0