Canonical Question
-
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all.
At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product.
I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc....I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc....As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content.
As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages?
Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps.
Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly.
Any comments would be welcome..
-
Thanks, as i thought the issue is something that cannot be answered until its done. I am going to leave the tag in for the moment as we are still ranking for keywords.
Will however watch traffic closely and compare over next to previous landing pages.
Thanks for the comment.
-
Technically, Google doesn't recommend the canonical tag in these situations, but it's a gray area. They do say that you can set a canonical to the "View All" version in paginated search results, and you've got something similar here - each sub-page is a sub-set of the full results.
Other options are to simply META NOINDEX the break-down pages or tell Google to ignore the parameters in GWT. Unfortunately, it really depends a lot on the situation and URL/crawl structure, so it's a bit hard to speak in generalities.
I'd be very surprised if this caused you any kind of Penguin problems. I've seen bad canonicalization cause problems in general, but it's probably just coincidental timing here. The biggest risk would be if you had direct traffic/links to the sub-pages. The canonical should pass most of the link-juice, but if a lot of people were running queries like "glass blue widgets" and "plastic red widgets" then canonicalizing those back up to the root page may have weakened your ranking ability.
It's a tough call - often, cleaning up these kinds of near-duplicate pages can be helpful, but it really depends a lot on your audiences and the nature of your traffic. Can you isolate the lost traffic? See if it was coming directly to these deeper pages or via long-tail keywords. If it was, it's very likely cutting off these pages caused some harm. If you've lost ranking on broad keywords or across all pages, then I suspect something else is going on.
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
Canonicals being ignored
Hi, I've got a site that I'm working with that has 2 ways of viewing the same page - a property details page. Basically one version if the long version: /property/Edinburgh/Southside-Newington/6CN99V and the other just the short version with the code only on the end: /6cn99v There is a canonical in place from the short version to the long version, and the sitemap.xml only lists the long version HOWEVER - Google is indexing the short version in the majority of cases (not all but the majority). http://www.website.com/property/Edinburgh/Southside-Newington/6CN99V"> Obviously "www.website.com" contains the URL of the site itself. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | squarecat.ben0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
What is "canonical." And what do I need to do to fix it?
I'm seeing about 450 warnings on this. What is "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical." And what do I need to do to fix it?
Technical SEO | | KimCalvert0 -
Another http vs https Question?
Is it better to keep the Transaction/ Payment pages on a commercial website as the only secure ones (https) and remainder of website as http? Or is it better to have all the commercial website as secure (https)?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Do I have a canonical problem?
Does this site www.davidclick.com have a canonical problem because the home page can be requested via 3 different urls http://www.davidclick.com/
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://davidclick.com/
http://www.davidclick.com/index.htm but I'm confused in terms of applying a fix for example all advice here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#1 says i need to identify the duplicate files and add So my question is please if I do have a canonical problem how can i fix it when I only have one file for my home page, there are no duplicates 😞 Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Canonical tags and internal Google search
Quick question: I want some pages that will have canonical tags, to show up in internal results for a Google site search that's built into the site. I'm not finished with the site, but is it correct to assume that pages with canonical will NOT show up in internal site search results, when powered by Google?
Technical SEO | | EricPacifico0