Rel canonical with index follow on query string URLs
-
Hi guys,
Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag.
I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed.
I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page?
So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC
meta robots is "index, follow"
Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html"
Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for the responses guys.
@oznappies: I'll have the canonical line at the top for best practices and so it's visible.
@Ryan - My CMS has the option to noindex/nofollow too as there are some pages we don't want indexed. Thanks for the heads up about the WMT/Bing method though.
-
Hi Panini.
The location of the canonical tag does not matter as long as it is somewhere within the tags.
A couple extra notes:
-
the "index, follow" tag is not required. That is the default behavior of crawlers. I would suggest not adding that information as it is unnecessary code
-
you can specify in Google Webmaster Tools how you wish parameters to be treated. From your WMT dashboard > Site Configurations > Settings > Parameter handling tab. Bing has a similar setting in their webmaster's tools section.
-
-
It shouldn't, but I would always place rel canonical as the first line to ensure that it is indexed first and all references are relative to that. This is a developer preference as it is a good design practice. This works on pages we host and create. You should also inform webmaster tool of any parameters you use and to ignore them,even though you have the rel canonical.
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
-
Rel Canonicals not working properly.
We recently implemented rel=canonicals on a few of our pages to prevent query parameters from showing up in the SERPs. The two pages we added the tags to are no longer ranking. The pages used to rank very well for branded terms such as "morningstar direct" and "morningstar sustainability", but now don't show up at all. When you search for the urls specifically, for example "products/direct morningstar" the query parameter is still indexing. Does anyone know why this might be or what we can do to fix this issue? The two pages are www.morningstar.com/products/direct and https://www.morningstar.com/company/sustainability
Technical SEO | | jmigdal0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
Parked former company's url on top of my existing url and that URL is showing in SERPs for my top keywords
I have the URL from my former company parked on top of my existing URL. My top keywords are showing up with the old URL attached to the metadsecription of my existing URL. It was supposed to be 301 redirected instead of parked but my web developer insists this was the right way to do it and it will work itself out after google indexes the old URL out of existence. Are there any other options?
Technical SEO | | Joelabarre0 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Writing of url query strings to be seo frinedly
I understand the basic concepts of url write and creating inbound and outbound rules. I understand the creating of rules to rewrite url query strings so that it’s readable and seo friendly. It’s simple when dealing with a small number of pages and database records. (Microsoft Server, asp.net 4.0, IIS 7) However, I need to understand the concept to handle this: Viz the following: We have a database of 10,000+ establishments, 650+ cities, 400+ suburbs. Each establishment can be searched for by country, province, city and suburb. The search results show establishments that match the search criteria. Each establishment has its own unique id. Each establishment in the search results table has a link to the establishments detailed profile aspx page. The link is a query string such as http://www.ubuntustay.com/detailed.aspx?id=4 which opens the establishments profile. We need to rewrite the url to be something like: http://www.ubuntustay.com/detailed.aspx/capetown/westerncape/capetown/campsbay/diamondhouse which should still open the same establishment profile as the above query string. I can manually create a rule for this one example above without a problem. But there are over 10,000 establishments, all in different provinces, cities and suburbs. Surely we don’t manually generate a rewrite rule for each establishment? The resulting .htaccess will be rather large(?!) Therefore my questions are: How do I create url rewrite rules for dynamic query strings that originate from a large dataset? How do I translate the id number into the equivalent <country>/<province>/<city>/<suburb>/ <establishment>syntax?</establishment></suburb></city></province></country> Do I have to wire-up the global.asax so that every incoming requests extracts the country, province, city and suburb based on the establishment id which seem a bit cumbersome(?). If you’re wondering how I currently do it (it works but it’s not very portable or efficient): For each establishment which is included on the search results I simply construct the link url as: http://www.ubuntustay.com/detailed.aspx/4/Diamond%20House/Camps%20Bay/Cape%20Town On the detailed.aspx page load I simply extract the record id (4 in the example above) from the querystring and select that record from the db. Claude, what I’m looking for is advice on the best approach on how to create these rewrite rules and would be grateful if you can have one of your SEO friends lend their advice and experience. Any web resources that show the above techniques would be great. I’m not really looking for simple web links to url rewriting overviews…I have plenty of those. It’s the detail on the specific requirement above that I need please.
Technical SEO | | claudeSteyn0 -
Non-Canonical Pages still Indexed. Is this normal?
I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes. So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's. Problem is this has not quite worked. I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago. This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them. Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why? I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job. Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's. In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work. Examples Below- Old Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235 New Pages: www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name Canonical tag on both pages: rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Help with Rel Canonical on Wordpress?
Crawl Diagnostics is showing a lot of Rel Canonical warnings, I've installed Wordpress SEO by Joose De Valk and Home Canonical URL plugins without success. Any ideas? I'm getting a lot of URL's that I thought I blocked from being indexed, such as author pages, category pages, etc. I'm also getting stuff like "recessionitis.com/?homeq=recent" and "recessionitis.com/page/2/", those pages are similar to my homepage. I thought those plugins were suppose to automatically clean things up.. anyone use these plugins that have any helpful hints?
Technical SEO | | 10JQKAs0