How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
-
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK...
Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not?
So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site.
I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available.
Any insights welcome
-
A suggestion that all major search engines obey. We used it massively and it is 100% listened to by search engines.
-
Keep in mind that rel=canonical is more of a suggestion than a command.
-
Hey Nightwing
I think you need to be careful here. A 301 is a re-direct whereas a canonical is telling Google, Bing etc to treat this page as a duplicate and not index it.
To quote Google: "A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content."
See Matt Cutts and all his beauty explain here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
A canonical won't re-direct the page like a 301, the page still exists, it's just that search engines will remove it from SERPs.
As long as the code is all set up right, the only way to check for a canonical is working is to review the code.....and it should also drop out of the SERPs too.
Hope this helps.
Stay warm
-
Morning Nightwing
We also had some snow here in B'ham but it's almost gone now.
If you want to be sure then simply implement 301 redirects. When doing a manual check, like the one you've mentioned above, you can look at your SEOmoz toolbar and you will often see a difference in PA of different versions of your page.
-
Use screaming frog.
Using the free version it will crawl up to 500 pages. For each page it will then provide the status code i.e. 302, 400 e.t.c That way you can determine if there are any page issues.
In general, Google Webmaster Tools is your best bet of showing a sites cannonical issues. Otherwise you can also try SEOMoz's pro tools ;0
Hope this helps.
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
-
Manual Action
Quick question. As an example, a client has a site named site.com and then changed their business name and business url to site2.com I was informed that the site.com has a manual action (Pages affected by manual actions can see reduced display features, lower ranking, or even removal from Google Search results.) The page obviously is not active as it 301's to site2.com. Site.com has a 301 to site2.com. My questions? Does 301 transfer link power? So if a site is penalized, will the links that 301 cause problems to the new site2.com? I've requested them to remove the 301. Will, that fix it? Do we need to request a review? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Any SEO-wizards out there who can tell me why Google isn't following the canonicals on some pages?
Hi, I am banging my head against the wall regarding the website of a costumer: In "duplicate title tags" in GSC I can see that Google is indexing a whole bunch parametres of many of the url's on the page. When I check the rel=canonical tag, everything seems correct. My costumer is the biggest sports retailer in Norway. Their webshop has approximately 20 000 products. Yet they have more than 400 000 pages indexed by Google. So why is Google indexing pages like this? What is missing in this canonical?https://www.gsport.no/herre/klaer/bukse-shorts?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=descWhy isn't Google just cutting off the ?type-bukser-334=regnbukser&order=price&dir=desc part of the url?Can it be the canonical-tag itself, or could the problem be somewhere in the CMS? Looking forward to your answers Sigurd
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Are thousands of 404s a problem?
An ecommerce site I work on has around 16,000 URLs that are 404s in Webmaster Tools. The vast majority are for products that are no longer stocked by the site, which is a natural occurrence in ecommerce. But my question is, could these possibly be harming rankings?
Technical SEO | | creativemay1 -
Content Duplication and Canonical Tag settings
Hi all, I have a question regarding content duplication.My site has posted one fresh content in the article section and set canonical in the same page for avoiding content duplication._But another webmaster has taken my post and posted the same in his site with canonical as his site url. They have not given to original source as well._May I know how Google will consider these two pages. Which site will be affected with content duplication by Google and how can I solve this issue?If two sites put canonical tags in there own pages for the same content how the search engine will find the original site which posted fresh content. How can we avoid content duplication in this case?
Technical SEO | | zco_seo0 -
Canonical Tag - Magento - Help
Hello, I was hoping to get some help or tips on how to best control the canonical tag on a Magento based website. When you go into the Magento admin and enable the option to use the canonical tag on pages, all that does is input the canonical tag to the exact page just with the http:// in the url. My goal is to use the canonical tag on specific pages and point it to other pages, not just the same page with an http:// For example, right now for page: example.com/question/baseball the canonical tag is pointing to http://example.com/question/baseball What i want is to be able to do is take: example.com/question/baseball and have the canonical tag point to example.com/question/baseballbats Is this possible? Does what I'm saying make sense? Please let me know what you all think.... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Duplicate content problem?
Hello! I am not sure if this is a problem or if I am just making something too complicated. Here's the deal. I took on a client who has an existing site in something called homestead. Files cannot be downloaded, making it tricky to get out of homestead. The way it is set up is new sites are developed on subdomains of homestead.com, and then your chosen domain points to this subdomain. The designer who built it has kindly given me access to her account so that I can edit the site, but this is awkward. I want to move the site to its own account. However, to do so Homestead requires that I create a new subdomain and copy the files from one to the other. They don't have any way to redirect the prior subdomain to the new one. They recommend I do something in the html, since that is all I can access. Am I unnecessarily worried about the duplicate content consequences? My understanding is that now I will have two subdomains with the same exact content. True, over time I will be editing the new one. But you get what I'm sayin'. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | devbook90 -
Pagination V Canonical
Hi Guys, I am needing some help with regards to duplicate page content issues. Using Zen Cart on an ecommerce platform and it is bringing up duplicate page content on pages. For instance:- http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/ is the same as:- http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1 Rel=Prev/Next as I understand it will treat http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1 http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=2 http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=3 as one page but won't solve the issue of the duplicate content issues between:- http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/ and http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1 am I better using rel=Canonical here instead??? Kind Regards Neil
Technical SEO | | jazzah0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050