Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag
-
I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations:
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview
Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out.
We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below.
<html> <head> <title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)"> <link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta name="keywords" content="Astonishing Event, Inc, Somerset Massachusetts, Massachusetts Wedding Wedding Planners Directory, Massachusetts weddings, wedding Massachusetts ">
<meta name="description" content="Get information and read reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MA. Astonishing Event, Inc appears in the directory of Somerset MA wedding Wedding Planners on WeddingReportsMA.com."><script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-173959-2"; urchinTracker(); script>
head>
-
Thanks for your help, I get it now!
In addition to your video, I also found a post on Matt Cutts' blog that answers it:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
No, if you remove it page will not show up as canonical element indicates to google that you do not want the page it is paleced on to rank, but it is still able to pass link juice. It is like a 301 redirect, with the difference that users are still able to read the pae content on the sepcific url. Here's a video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM
-
Are you saying that I should remove the robots noindex tag altogether? If I do that, the pages with the canonical code will still show up in G, right?
If yes, Is there any alterative if I don't want that to happen?
Thanks for the help!
-
The canonical code is ok, but the with robots noindex it won't work. You cannot redirect something that is not indexed. Move robots tag and you shall be fine.
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
-
<aside>Tag Use</aside>
Hi Guys, Just after some clarification - I have recently been told that by placing content in <aside></aside> tags spiders will ignore the content. Is this the case? I always thought that content placed in these tags was to identify related content. To put the query into some context, we have the same content on multiple pages on a site, which is relevant to the main body copy - but could throw up duplicate content issues... Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOBirmingham811 -
Canonical Rel .uk and .au to .com site?
Hi guys, we have a client whose main site is .com but who has a .co.uk and a com.au site promoting the same company/brand. Each site is verified locally with a local address and phone but when we create content for the sites that is universal, should I rel=canonical those pages on the .co.uk and .com.au sites to the .com site? I saw a post from Dr. Pete that suggests I should as he outlines pretty closely the situation we're in: "The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site." Thanks in advance for your insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wcbuckner0 -
Error: Missing required field "updated"
In my WordPress blog, there are pages for tags,categories,... like : https://www.abc.com/blog/category/how-to-cook-something/ On these pages I am getting the following error: Error: Missing required field "updated" So far I have 39 if these errors. Please let me know if this is an important issue to pay attention to? If yes, how I can fix it? Thanks Everyone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
What is the best canonical url to use for a product page?
I just helped a client redesign and launch a new website for their organic skin care company (www.hylunia.com). The site is built in Magento which by default creates MANY urls for each product. Which of these two do you think would be the best to use as the canonical version? http://www.hylunia.com/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielmoss
or http://www.hylunia.com/products/face-care/facial-moisturizers/pure-hyaluronic-acid-solution ? I'm leaning on the latter, because it makes sense to me to have the breadcrumbs match the url string, and also it seems having more keywords in the url would help. However, it's obviously a very long url, and there might be some benefits to using the shorter version that I'm not aware of. Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. Best, Daniel0 -
Rel canonical and duplicate subdomains
Hi, I'm working with a site that has multiple sub domains of entirely duplicate content. So, the production level site that visitors see is (for made-up illustrative example): 123abc456.edu Then, there are sub domains which are used by different developers to work on their own changes to the production site, before those changes are pushed to production: Larry.123abc456.edu Moe.123abc456.edu Curly.123abc456.edu Google ends up indexing these duplicate sub domains, which is of course not good. If we add a canonical tag to the head section of the production page (and therefor all of the duplicate sub domains) will that cause some kind of problem... having a canonical tag on a page pointing to itself? Is it okay to have a canonical tag on a page pointing to that same page? To complete the example... In this example, where our production page is 123abc456.edu, our canonical tag on all pages (this page and therefor the duplicate subdomains) would be: Is that going to be okay and fix this without causing some new problem of a canonical tag pointing to the page it's on? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Hidden Content with "clip"
Hi We're relaunching a site with a Drupal 7 CMS. Our web agency has hidden content on it and they say it's for Accessibility (I don't see the use myself, though). Since they ask for more cash in order to remove it, the management is unsure. So I wanted to check if anyone knows whether this could hurt us in search engines. There is a field in the HTML where you can skip to the main content: Skip to main content The corresponding CSS comes here: .element-invisible{position:absolute !important;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);clip:rect(1px,1px,1px,1px);} #skip-link a,#skip-link a:visited{position:absolute;display:block;left:0;top:-500px;width:1px;height:1px;overflow:hidden;text-align:center;background-color:#666;color:#fff;} The crucial point is that they're hiding the text "skip to main content", using clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px), which shrinks the text to one pixel. So IMO this is hiding content. How bad is it? PS: Hope the source code is sufficient. Ask me if you need more. Thx!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner0 -
Use of rel=canonical to view all page & No follow links
Hey, I have a couple of questions regarding e-commerce category pages and filtering options: I would like to implement the rel=canonical to the view all page as suggested on this article on googlewebmastercentral. If you go on one of my category pages you will see that both the "next page link" and the "view all" links are nofollowed. Is that a mistake? How does nofoolow combines with canonical view all? Is it a good thing to nofollow the "sorty by" pages or should I also use Noindex for them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ypsilon0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0