Rel=Canonical to Rewrite or original URL?
-
Working with a large number of duplicate pages due to different views of products. Rewriting URLs for the most linked page. Should rel=canonical point to the rewritten URL or the actual URL? Is there a way to see what the rewritten URL is within the crawl data?
I was taking the approach of rewriting only the base version of each page and then using a rel=canonical on the duplicate pages. Can anyone recommend a better or cleaner approach?
Haven't seen too many articles on retail SEO when faced with a less than optimized CMS.
Thanks!
-
We are using actual rewrites and then using rel=canonical for all sub pages.
-
If you are using rewriting in the web server software (like Apache), the rewritten URL is never exposed to users or search engines. Please clarify that you are actually rewriting URLs and not just redirecting them to the canonical version.
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
-
If Google's index contains multiple URLs for my homepage, does that mean the canonical tag is not working?
I have a site which is using canonical tags on all pages, however not all duplicate versions of the homepage are 301'd due to a limitation in the hosting platform. So some site visitors get www.example.com/default.aspx while others just get www.example.com. I can see the correct canonical tag on the source code of both versions of this homepage, but when I search Google for the specific URL "www.example.com/default.aspx" I see that they've indexed that specific URL as well as the "clean" one. Is this a concern... shouldn't Google only show me the clean URL?
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
URL removals
Hello there, I found out that some pages of the site have two different URL's pointing at the same page generating duplicate content, title and description. Is there a way to block one of them? cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Categories and rel canonical
Hello everyone, I have a doubt in how to approach this problem. I have a local business website, and i want to rank this website for our main KW. So the idea is to rank the main Keyword to the home page www.sitename.com At the same time we blog every week and one of the categories is the same has the main Keyword. It makes sense because the majority of the blog posts are about it. In a certain way the homepage and the category page are competing for the same keyword. How can i approach this problem? Should i use rel canonical in the category page, pointing to the homepage? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | Barbio0 -
.Rel=author
For the purpose of implementing rel=author, 1. Whether http://www.ultraseo.com/blogs/ is my "Author page" 2. Where should i link from my Google profile to website http://www.ultraseo.com/ I mean, in which tab or section in Google profile should i link back to website ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Ignore Urls with pattern.
I have 7000 warnings of urls because of a 302 redirect. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/44060409.png/ I want to get rid of those, is it possible to get rid of the Urls with robots.txt. For example that it does not crawl anything that has /product_compare/ in its url? Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
URL paths and keywords
I'm recommending some on-page optimization for a home builder building in several new home communities. The site has been through some changes in the past few months and we're almost starting over. The current URL structure is http://homebuilder.com/oakwood/features where homebuilder = builder name Oakwood Estates= name of community features = one of several sub-paths including site plan, elevations, floor plans, etc. The most attainable keyword phrases include the word 'home' and 'townname' I want to change the URL path to: http://homebuilder.com/oakwood-estates-townname-homes/features Is there any problem with doing this? It just seems to make a lot of sense. Any input would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | mikescotty0 -
How does a sitemap affect the definition of canonical URLs?
We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | emilyburns0 -
Confused about rel="canonical"
I'm receiving a duplicate content error in my reports for www.example.com and www.example.com/index.htm. Should I put the rel="canonical" on the index page and point it to www.example.com? And if I have other important pages where rel="canonical" is being suggested do I place the rel="canonical" on that page? For example if www.example/product is an important page would I place on that page?
Technical SEO | | BrandonC-2698870