Rel canonical = can it hurt your SEO
-
I have a site that has been developed to default to the non-www version. However each page has a rel canonical to the non-www version too.
Could having this in place on all pages hurt the site in terms of search engines?
thanks
Steve
-
Thanks Yannick, much appreciated.
-
Ah. Yes. Delete the tag.
It's not giving the right signals if it is saying that the page you are currently on is a copy of the page you are currently on.
It's not meant to be used site wide.
Bing has an interesting article about it.
-
Hey Yannick. Thanks
And just to be clear. There is 1 file for each page serving bot www & non-www version with a 301 redirect pointing all requests to the non-www URL.
The rel canonical is in every file so search engines will see the rel canonical on every request.
I'm thinking this MUST have some effect on the site. What to you think?
-
Search enigines wont even reach the rel canical tag, because they'll be redirected before anything else loads from the www version.
Just make sure you do link building to the non www version.
-
Hi Yannick
Thanks for the reply. I've been working on "on page" stuff for the last month for a site and noticed that I'm getting no improvement at all in ranking.
This is very unusual I think.
The tech guys on the site are 301'ing to the non-www site AND have placed a re canonical to the non-www version too.
My thought are to have the rel canonical removed as there is a 301 (.htaccess) in place.
Thanks again
Steve
-
I would say, Yes.
In my opinion, but I don't think there has been any concise research about this, a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect passes a lot of link juice to the page it is redirecting to, but not all. So I would say yes, this is hurting your SEO because you're not keeping all the juice you could keep when not using the rel = canonical. (or a redirect for that matter)
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
-
Static Links in Sidebar Hurting SEO?
Our website currently has a sidebar/widget area that appears on almost all pages throughout of entire site (350 page domain). In that sidebar, we have some static links and some non-static links. Right now there are: 6 Related Post Links - Non-Static
Technical SEO | | DemiGR
1 - Call To Action - Static to a landing page
10 Calculators - Static - These calculators I think are very useful to our users (financial website). So in total 17 total sidebar links, 11 static links, and 6 which change based on the content of the page. Do you think these static links from an SEO perspective can be hurting us? Is there some sort of best practice for sidebar links in regards to quantity as well as static vs non-static? Thanks!0 -
Hi Mozers, is the AMP project is supposed to be an SEO factor on mobile platforms? Also, can it be used on ecommerce sites such as Magento or Shopify as well? Thanks!
It stands to reason that Google will favor early adopters of Accelerated Mobile Pages, but it seems heavily geared toward news publishers so far. What about regular Wordpress sites, or ecommerce sites like Shopify, should AMP be pursued on that type of CMS?
Technical SEO | | CalamityJane771 -
Canonical URL on frontpage
I have a site where the CMS system have added a canonical URL on my frontpage, pointing to a subpage on my site. Something like on my domain root.Google is still showing MyDomain.com as the result in the search engines which is good, but can't this approach hurt my ranking? I mean it's basically telling google that my frontpage content is located far down the hierarki, instead of my domain root, which of course have the most authority.
Technical SEO | | EdmondHong87
Something seems to indicate that this could very well be the case, as we lost several placements after moving to this new CMS system a few months ago.0 -
Robots and Canonicals on Moz
We noticed that Moz does not use a robots "index" or "follow" tags on the entire site, is this best practice? Also, for pagination we noticed that the rel = next/prev is not on the actual "button" rather in the header Is this best practice? Does it make a difference if it's added to the header rather than the actual next/previous buttons within the body?
Technical SEO | | PMPLawMarketing0 -
Canonical redirects
Hello, I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content. I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP. As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/ Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Thanks! 🙂 Eugenio0 -
Domain redirect seo
Hello, my domain www.pacomarca.com and when i start the new campaing i get this pronblem: We have detected that the domain www.pacomarca.com and the domain pacomarca.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here. my domain is in networksolutions.com. how can i resolve it? many thanks Gonzalo
Technical SEO | | Kuna0 -
Rel=canonical + no index
We have been doing an a/b test of our hp and although we placed a rel=canonical tag on the testing page it is still being indexed. In fact at one point google even had it showing as a sitelink . We have this problem through out our website. My question is: What is the best practice for duplicate pages? 1. put only a rel= canonical pointing to the "wanted original page" 2. put a rel= canonical (pointing to the wanted original page) and a no index on the duplicate version Has anyone seen any detrimental effect doing # 2? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
Best usage of rel canonical in case of pagination for content list ?
I've looked at most of the question in the Q&A who speak about pagination but didn't find a clear answer to my concern. So here is my question : On the website i work for, we have list of recipes with this info for each recipe : picture, title, type, difficulty, time and author. 10 recipes per pages and X pages for each list. Would you use link rel canonical on page X with first page as value ? (i've seen this answer in one question here)
Technical SEO | | kr0hmy
Or canonicalize to page X keeping each page of the list in the index ?
Would the content be seen as duplicate if we don't use rel canonical and just add page X in the title? Or would it be unique enough with all the infos? Thanks for your help on this !0