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.
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
-
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed.
On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
-
I looked at the sitemap, and they are including the http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz but not the canonical page - http://www.masternewmedia.org/entrepreneurship-the-full-story-of-seomoz-told-by-rand-fishkin/
So based on this example, the page on SEOMoz is still included in the sitemap, regardless if it has a canonical or not.
This seems to make sense, since canonical links are used only as a hint and not an absolute directive.
I also noticed that Google is choosing to index and rank both pages, on Page 1.
SEOMoz is ranking higher on my browser for "the full story of seomoz". A few things going on here.
-
Why is google choosing to rank SEOMoz higher than Mastermedia.org for this page? There's a canonical setup, but google is choosing not to follow it. (again its a hint not an absolute) this doesn't always work.
-
I would think Google would be able to filter out the duplicate content easy. In this example, they are clearly not. SEOMoz is ranking #4 and Masternewmedia.org is ranking #5 for query "the full story of seomoz"
-
-
Right - as far as I know, you're supposed to put end URLs into a sitemap, not urls which 301 redirect. Cross domain canonical is still kind of new, but I would treat them as a 301 redirect and not include them in a sitemap.
Now, if you're curious, SEO Moz did a whiteboard Friday where they talked about this same exact issue (cross domain canonical), and as an experiment, re-posted a blog article from another blogger on SEO Moz.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
http://www.seomoz.org/blog-sitemap.xml
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz
The blog is still included in the blog sitemap. I think it probably won't 'hurt' to keep those pages in the sitemap, since a lot of sitemaps automatically generated CMS tools won't have been updated to deal with this yet.
-
There is no BIG problem if you add the pages that contain cross domain canonical tag on them. Why?
The reason why I can say this is because Google is not only indexing the pages from sitemap.xml file, Google have their own crawler and they have the ability to crawl and index the website no matter if you do not have an xml sitemap.
Google is very good at (in my opinion) picking the instructions that are available on the page so if you add the page in the xml sitemap, the crawler will read the instructions on the page and will only index the page that contain original content.
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
-
When creating a sub-domain, does that sub-domain automatically start with the DA of the main domain?
We have a website with a high DA and we are considering sub-folder or sub-domain. One of the great benefits of a sub-folder is that we know we get to keep the high DA, is this also the case for sub-domains? Also if you could provide any sources of information that specify this, I can't see to find anything!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Saba.Elahi.M.0 -
Using Canonical URL to poin to an external page
I was wondering if I can use a canonical URL that points to a page residing on external site? So a page like:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | llamb
www.site1.com/whatever.html will have a canonical link in its header to www.site2.com/whatever.html. Thanks.0 -
Weird 404 URL Problem - domain name being placed at end of urls
Hey there. For some reason when doing crawl tests I'm finding pages with the domain name being tacked on the end and causing 404 errors.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay328
For example: http://domainname.com/page-name/http://domainname.com This is happening to all pages, posts and even category type 1. Site is in Wordpress
2. Using Yoast SEO plugin Any suggestions? Thanks!0 -
What's the deal with significantLinks?
http://schema.org/significantLink Schema.org has a definition for "non-navigation links that are clicked on the most." Presumably this means something like the big green buttons on Moz's homepage. But does anyone know how they affect anything? In http://moz.com/blog/schemaorg-a-new-approach-to-structured-data-for-seo#comment-142936, Jeremy Nelson says " It's quite possible that significant links will pass anchor text as well if a previous link to the page was set in navigation, effictively making obselete the first-link-counts rule, and I am interested in putting that to test." This is a pretty obscure comment but it's one of the only results I could find on the subject. Is this BS? I can't even make out what all of it is saying. So what's the deal with significantLinks and how can we use them to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NerdsOnCall0 -
Brackets vs Encoded URLs: The "Same" in Google's eyes, or dup content?
Hello, This is the first time I've asked a question here, but I would really appreciate the advice of the community - thank you, thank you! Scenario: Internal linking is pointing to two different versions of a URL, one with brackets [] and the other version with the brackets encoded as %5B%5D Version 1: http://www.site.com/test?hello**[]=all&howdy[]=all&ciao[]=all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile
Version 2: http://www.site.com/test?hello%5B%5D**=all&howdy**%5B%5D**=all&ciao**%5B%5D**=all Question: Will search engines view these as duplicate content? Technically there is a difference in characters, but it's only because one version encodes the brackets, and the other does not (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp) We are asking the developer to encode ALL URLs because this seems cleaner but they are telling us that Google will see zero difference. We aren't sure if this is true, since engines can get so _hung up on even one single difference in character. _ We don't want to unnecessarily fracture the internal link structure of the site, so again - any feedback is welcome, thank you. 🙂0 -
Yoast & rel canonical for paginated Wordpress URLs
Hello, our Wordpress blog at http://www.jobs.ca/career-resources has a rel canonical issue since we added pagination to the front page and category-pages. We're using Yoast and it's incorrectly applying a rel-canonical meta tag referencing page 1 on page 2, 3, etc. This is a known misuse of the rel-canonical tag (per Google's Webmaster Blog - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html, which says rel-canonical should be replaced with rel-prev and rel-next for page 2, 3, etc.). We don't see a way to specify anywhere in Yoast's options to correct this behaviour for page 2, 3, etc. Yoast allows you to override a page's canonical URL, otherwise it automatically uses the Wordpress permalink. My question is, does anyone know how to configure Yoast to properly replace rel-canonical tags with rel-prev and rel-next for paginated URLs, or do I need to look at another plugin or customize the behavior directly in my child theme code? This issue was brought up here as well: http://moz.com/community/q/canonical-help, but the only response did not relate to Yoast. (We're using Wordpress 3.6.1 and Yoast "Wordpress SEO" 1.4.18)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aactive0 -
Canonical link vs root domain
I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JosephFrost0 -
Submitting URLs multiple times in different sitemaps
We have a very dynamic site, with a large number of pages. We use a sitemap index file, that points to several smaller sitemap files. The question is: Would there be any issue if we include the same URL in multiple sitemap files? Scenario: URL1 appears on sitemap1. 2 weeks later, the page at URL1 changes and we'd like to update it on a sitemap. Would it be acceptable to add URL1 as an entry in sitemap2? Would there be any issues with the same URL appearing multiple times? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msquare0