Canonical tag in preferred and duplicate page
-
Hi,
I have a super spiffy (not) CMS that tends to create some pages at the root level of the site (not where I want it) i.e. www.site.com/page.htm as well as the desired location i.e. www.site.com/category/keyword/page.htm . Now obviously a canonical tag inserted into the URL at the undesired location would be the best option, however the source code is exactly the same for both pages (can’t change this) i.e. if I put the canonical tag that reads www.site.com/category/keyword/page.htm"/> it will appear in the head section of both pages, the desired URL and the non desired URL. Will a canonical tag inserted into the head section of a the preferred URL directing the search engine spiders pretty much to itself cause more grieft than the solution it offers re duplicate content ?
Marc
-
DW about this question-i seem to have found the answer in this blog post
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dispelling-a-persistent-rel-canonical-myth
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
-
Duplicate content, although page has "noindex"
Hello, I had an issue with some pages being listed as duplicate content in my weekly Moz report. I've since discussed it with my web dev team and we decided to stop the pages from being crawled. The web dev team added this coding to the pages <meta name='robots' content='max-image-preview:large, noindex dofollow' />, but the Moz report is still reporting the pages as duplicate content. Note from the developer "So as far as I can see we've added robots to prevent the issue but maybe there is some subtle change that's needed here. You could check in Google Search Console to see how its seeing this content or you could ask Moz why they are still reporting this and see if we've missed something?" Any help much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Blog archive pages are meta noindexed but still flagged as duplicate
Hi all. I know there several threads related to noindexing blog archives and category pages, so if this has already been answered, please direct me to that post. My blog archive pages have preview text from the posts. Each time I post a blog, the last post on any given archive page shifts to the first spot on the next archive page. Moz seems to report these as new duplicate content issues each week. I have my archive pages set to meta noindex, so can I feel good about continuing to ignore these duplicate content issues, or is there something else I should be doing to prevent penalties? TIA!
Technical SEO | | mkupfer1 -
Does Canonical Tag Syntax Matter?
Does anyone know definitively if the format of the canonical tag matters? Silly question I know. vs
Technical SEO | | Healio0 -
What is the best way to use canonical tag
Hi, i have been researching this since yesterday and have looked at this subject many times before but still cannot get my head around it. i done a report on my site which was very useful, i used http://www.juxseo.com for my site www.in2town.co.uk and it brought me some useful information but part of that info was it was telling me that i should have on my home page a canonical tag which would improve my seo. Now i am using sh404sef for my friendly urls and i am using joomla 3.0 and when i approached the makers of the sh404sef to ask about the tag they said i would need to be careful of using it as it could damage my site and my rankings. i have read lots of information but still do not have a clear understanding behind it. can anyone please explain the best way to use this and should i be using where i may have some sort of duplicate page, any help to understand this would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Home page canonical issues
I think I’ve got a canonical issue with a client’s site that I’m having problems with I’ve noticed in their analytics that they receive traffic from themselves. I’ve used ‘ rel canonical’ throughout the site to avoid any dup issues and I have 301’ed every other variation of the home page I can think of. I don’t have full access to the back end of the host to control any of the iis as it’s an asp site. They seem to be getting traffic from their site under the URL of, example.com I’ve 301 redirected www.example.com/home.asp www.example.com/default.asp www.example.com/index.asp to www.example.com And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FarkyRafiq0 -
Magento Canonical Tags
Magento pages have been giving me a lot of trouble with the canonical tags. In some cases duplicate pages are showing up, so I need to add the canonical tag. In other cases I'm getting an error that there are multiple canonical tags per page. How can I get my pages canonized without duplicate tags? It seems like it's either too much or not enough, no matter what I do. Note: this only applies to category and product pages.
Technical SEO | | GravitateOnline0 -
Does duplicate content on word press work against the site rank? (not page rank)
I noticed in the crawl that there seems to be some duplicate content with my word press blog. I installed a seo plugin, Yoast's wordpress seo plugin, and set it to keep from crawling the archives. This might solve the problem but my main question is can the blog drag my site down?
Technical SEO | | tommr10 -
URL query strings and canonical tag
Hi, I have recently been getting my comparison website redesigned and developed onto wordpress and the site is now 90% complete. Part of the redesign has meant that there are now dynamic urls in the format: http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10 I have other pages similar to this but with different content for the different price ranges and these are linked to from the menus: http://www.mywebsite.com/20-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=20 Now my questions are: 1. I am using Joost's All-in-one SEO plugin and this adds a canonical tag to the page that is pointing to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/ which is the permalink. Is this OK as it is or should i change this to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=10 2. Which URL will get indexed, what gets shown as the display URL in the SERPs and what page will users land on? I'm a bit confused so apologies if these seem like silly questions. Thanks
Technical SEO | | bizarro10000