Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
-
Hi!
I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains.
1 product info page
2 same product but GREEN
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW**Question: **
Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1.
Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element.
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language.
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language?
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ?
/Lars
-
Wow, that's a tricky one. I haven't seen a lot of good data on rel="alternate" hreflang="x" yet, other than general suggestions that it's worth trying and seems to sometimes work. Technically, Google would say that the green/red/yellow versions aren't true duplicates, but practically, I think the canonical here is a good approach.
My gut feeling is that the canonical will overpower the hreflang - adding the alternate language versions to the color variants won't hurt you, but it probably won't do anything. If it were me, I think I'd go with your first approach - just add the hreflang tag to the canonical version and leave it off the variants. Monitor that - see how it impacts your international rankings, and go from there.
-
Have you had any joy with this yet?
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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
How to find orphan pages
Hi all, I've been checking these forums for an answer on how to find orphaned pages on my site and I can see a lot of people are saying that I should cross check the my XML sitemap against a Screaming Frog crawl of my site. However, the sitemap is created using Screaming Frog in the first place... (I'm sure this is the case for a lot of people too). Are there any other ways to get a full list of orphaned pages? I assume it would be a developer request but where can I ask them to look / extract? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | KJH-HAC1 -
Non Published Wordpress Pages
Hi, Is there any negative SEO consequences from having too many pages private or not published. Can it like slow the site down or does it not matter? Someone in my dept. has so many pages started/not complete and besides being messy, I wonder if it has any negative impact on the site. Thanks
Technical SEO | | aua1 -
Can you noindex a page, but still index an image on that page?
If a blog is centered around visual images, and we have specific pages with high quality content that we plan to index and drive our traffic, but we have many pages with our images...what is the best way to go about getting these images indexed? We want to noindex all the pages with just images because they are thin content... Can you noindex,follow a page, but still index the images on that page? Please explain how to go about this concept.....
Technical SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Adding Rel Canonical to multiple pages
Hi, Our CMS generates a lot of duplicate content, (Different versions of every page for 3 different font sizes). There are many other reasons why we should drop this current CMS and go with something else, and we are in the process of doing that. But for now, does anyone know how would I do the following: I've created a spreadsheet that contains the following: Column 1: rel="canonical" tag for URL Column 2: Duplicate Content URL # 1 Column 3: Duplicate Content URL # 2 Column 4: Duplicate Content URL # 3 I want to add the tag from column 1 into the head of every page from column 2,3, and 4. What would be a fast way to do this considering that I have around 1800 rows. Check the screenshot of the builtwith.com result to see more information about the website if that helps. Farris bxySL
Technical SEO | | jdossetti0 -
Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site. When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message. Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks. *** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are? Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
Technical SEO | | twilightofidols0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1