Very confused on site.com/ or not using a /
-
I'm wanting to put the rel="canonical" tag on my homepage but I'm not sure which to use?
How would you know what to use and always links to, http://www.site.com or http://www.site.com**/**
Personally I never knew there was a difference until I used the seomoz tool and I wasn't using the tag.
-
Hi GYMSN,
If you have a rel=canonical already then you should not worry. canonical tag was released to solve the problem of creating duplicate content through different path to the same page.
If you already have the "/" in the canonical, then I wouldn't advice to make any change. You are ready to optimize further other parts of the website.
Good luck
Istvan
-
Hi Istvan. Thanks for the response. When I checked both urls I seem to be coming up with the same link count and overall metrics using opensiteexplorer. All my sites are wordpress and I use all-in-one SEO and it appears to automatically add the / via rel canonical so maybe this won't allow me to check which is best?
-
Hi GYMSN,
Personally I would check the following before applying the canonical:
1. Check the incoming links to www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/
2. Compare the two lists, is there a major difference between them? Which one is getting better links?
If you have answered the question, you know which one to point out.
I hope that helped,
Istvan
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
-
Complex Rankings Issue For A Law Firm Site
Be warned, this is a complex issue that I have and will require someone who has some advanced knowledge about 301s and link penalty’s. I have a law firm client whose site is having some issues. There are some very complex details here so I'm going to articulate them in bullet points in hopes of making the issues easy to understand. So here's my root problem: We have poor organic rankings (4th, 5th, 6th page for most terms) despite Domain Authority of 32 (avg. 1st page competitor is 28) and some very strong white hat link building the last 60 days or so. How's their backlink profile look, you ask? When you look at their backlink profile in OSE, their spam score is a 1/17 (not sure if that's credible in any way). Lot's of links that score 5's on the spam score make up about 10% of their OSE links. Here’s where it gets tricky; those links are not directed the client's New URL, they are links that go to some old URLs the client used to have, for which they had an SEO guy who built all those crappy links. Those URLs with the crappy links (we'll call them The Crappy URLs) were 301'd (can we all agree 301'd is a verb?) to the NEW URL for just a couple of months. Shortly after that, NEW URL dropped almost completely out of Google, so the client turned off the 301s. So despite those 301s being turned off, OSE still shows all the links going to The Crappy URLs but is giving The New URL credit for them. Keep in mind, the 301s were turned off about 6 months ago so it’s a little strange that OSE still shows those 301s. This has led me to the conclusion that the Domain Authority that OSE shows of 32, is not a “real” number since it is seemingly based off links inherited from 301s that no longer exist. So now I’m trying to create an action plan for this client that will hopefully help us start to make some real progress in our rankings. This client does not have the budget to wait another 6 months for some sign of hope so time is of the essence. Here’s my theoretical action plans I’m choosing from and would like the communities input on which, if any, they feel is best (Also, if I’m missing something or you have an idea, I’m all ears): **Potential Action Plans: ** Do nothing, keep building quality links, creating quality content, monitor crawl reports/gwt for issues. That strategy is going to win long term. #1 + Create one page sites on The Crappy URLs, setup GWT for them, submit sitemaps thus forcing Google, OSE and other web crawlers to index them, thus removing any potential residual penalties from the 301s. NOTE: Currently The Crappy URLS are just landing on GoDaddy’s default landing page which is of course not being indexed by Google or OSE. #2 + Disavow all the bad links going to The Crappy URLS. Then once the bad links no longer appear in the OSE profile for each of The Crappy Sites, 301 them again, thus inheriting the good links but not the bad. #1 + 301 the Crappy URLS back to the New URL, while also disavow any links going to The Crappy URLs. The logic here is that if the road back to recovery is going to be a few months away no matter what, when the 301 knocked them back 6 months ago no reputable link building was being done. I am cautiously optimistic the linkbuilding we are doing will eventually off set any penalty’s coming from the 301s. Plus now we’ll know the 32 Domain Authority OSE is giving us is real. This is the one I’m leaning towards quite frankly because I think it will reduce the recovery time and we’ll know somewhat quickly (30-60 days) if it’s actually working. 1-3 could each take 90 days before we know if it’s working. So please, if you have any expertise with any of this, your help or advice would be appreciated. I’d rather not share The New URL for obvious reasons but if you must know, simply message me and as long as you’re legit, I’ll share it with you.
Moz Pro | | BrianJGomez0 -
New pages on my web site
I have created web sites that appear somewhere on Google in hardly any time at all, but I appear to have forgotten something or things are different for pages added recently to an existing website. I have added a page on a particular subject, optimized it using on page grader, so that I get an A, and a check mark for everything except H1 tags and rel=canonical which my web hosting provider does not support. I do have a check mark for accessible to search engines The page has the format http://www.domain.com/specific-keyword It is in the menu, so should have internal links to it, as I understand it. I have created a new site map, and submitted it in webmaster tools. Interestingly it says that of the 96 pages only 76 were indexed is this a clue? and why would they not index a page I have then shared the page on google plus, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and twitter and some others In OSE it comes up as domain authority 28 page authority 1, the social media shares do show up in metrics on the right but no links internal or external are shown, they do on other pages I created in the same way. Is it just a case of waiting or is their something I do to help thank you
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
Open Site Explorer
Hi - open site explorer always showed backlinks to my site's blog for Wordpress, a couple of edu sites and others that ranked somewhat high. These are no longer being shown. However, they do show up on some other backlink check tools. Does anyone know why and if this should be a concern? Thanks. Don www.uniquegiftsanddecor.com
Moz Pro | | uniquegifts-2778790 -
How to recover from penguin hit for my site http://rndegrees.net
My site http://rndegrees.net hit by penguin and after that I worked on cloud tag and one duplicate page content which was present on my site, also I worked on back links though my site hasn't recovered yet. Please guide me if I missed on something to recover from penguin hit.
Moz Pro | | HQP0 -
Open Site Explorer Page Authority
Hello, I ran a report on my website at http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.carrentalbuddy.com.au and noticed my page authority went to 1. I also noticed a lot of our results that were showing high page authority have dropped right down. I checked other sites and they all seemed fine but was wondering if this is a open site explorer issue or a a www.carrentalbuddy.com.au issue? Kindest Regards, Chris
Moz Pro | | kymodo0 -
Links in Open Site Explorer turning into downloads
Hey guys. This is my first question on here so hello 🙂 I have noticed recently a couple of times in Open Site Explorer, when I am checking out links, they are direct download links. The two I have noticed are flash files and with one companies links, dropbox related. Can anyone shed any light on this? I am pretty new to SEO and find it really confusing. Thanks in advance 🙂
Moz Pro | | Nextman0 -
LDA vs Farmer/Panda Update
Has anyone re-run the correlation data for webpages' LDA Score since Google's Farmer/Panda update? I still have my writers use the LDA Tool and I am curious to know if there was a significant change in correlation now that "quality content" is touted as a more important ranking factor by Google.
Moz Pro | | costume0 -
Recent backlinks in Open Site Explorer as not showing
I saw the note today that the link index did it's monthly update, yet our site www.oznappies.com still only shows 1 linking root domain and I know there are many more links now. What do I need to do to get open Site Explorer to use the latest data? I enter our site, create the report and only see old information from 6 may 2011's link index. I have the same issue with competive link finder, links I know we have on the sites listed for our competitors are not showing for our site.
Moz Pro | | oznappies0