Real impact of canonical links?
-
I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites.
SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this!
Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP.
I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this?
I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority.
Here are 2 examples of what I mean:
1) Category pages
www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx
We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared.
- www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10
- www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20
The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different.
Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads:
2) Product pages
Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them.
You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page.
Example:
Search link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx
Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx
Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages?
Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!
-
Great points Dr Pete.
-
Especially post-Panda, duplicates can create a real mess. At best, it's a matter of dilution. The more pages in you have in Google's index that are "thin", the more thinly your internal link-juice (authority, basically) is spread. So, each page just gets less of it. In extreme cases, though, the entire site can suffer.
Canonicalization is tricky, and it's tough to be 100% sure from sample URLs, but my gut reacionts:
(1) Yes, I think you could safely use rel=canonical here. It's slightly odd, since these search pages are actually showing different lists of products, but your only real choices are rel=canonical or blocking the "prices=" parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. You could NOINDEX anything with "prices=" in it as well. I think canonical will work, though.
(2) This is definitely a case where you should use rel=canonical. There are true duplicates. Actually, the best case here is not to create these URLs, but I realize that's not always an option.
You could use GWT for #1, if development is an issue, but to solve (2) you're going to need some kind of page-level directive (like rel=canonical). There's no good way to get around the coding.
It's hard to gauge the impact, but I've definitely seen cases where the consequences of large scale duplicates were severe, and where large ranking/traffic improvements (as much as 3X, although it's not usually that dramatic) have occurred when the problem was fixed. To be aware that it's not instantaneous. It can take a few weeks to really see the impact.
-
Thanks for your feedback Nakul - glad I'm on the right track. The world of canonical links can certainly strain the old brain cells!
Don't suppose you have any other tips on how I can boost my product pages or any other things I should watch out for when employing canonical links across the entire site?
-
Yes, you are 100% on the right track. You do need the canonical tags in place ASAP. Both on the category and the product level.
And yes, duplicate content is also a very important consideration, so I would definitely suggest creating a business case to get unique copy done for each of your pages.
Both of these points are high priority and I am sure that's why you posted the question...to confirm. You are right.
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
-
Links
Hi 64% of our links come from a .com website and only 30% from .co.uk. We only do business in the UK should I continue with the .com links as they are easier to source. Does this hurt my SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Any idea why Google Search Console stopped showing "Internal Links" and "Links to your site"
Our default eCommerce property (https://www.pure-elegance.com) used to show several dozen External Links and several thousand Internal Links on Google Search Console. As of this Friday both those links are showing "No Data Available". I checked other related properties (https://pure-elegance.com, http:pure-elegance.com and http://www.pure-elegance.com) and all of them are showing the same. Our other statistics (like Search Analytics etc.) remain unchanged. Any idea what might have caused this and how to resolve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SudipG0 -
Links on page
Hi I have a web page which lists about 50-60 products which links out to either a pdf on the product or the main manufacturers website page containing product detail. The site in non e-commerce is this the site/page likely to get hit by Penguin? Would it be best to create a separate page for the product/manufacturer group i.e 5 or 6 pages but linking out to the PDFs etc...?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Advice on Link Building?
I know webmasters shouldn't focus on link building but unfortunately there are some types of content that doesn't get shared as much as other. And for content to go viral, it ain't that easy and it's almost impossible in some smaller niches where you don't have the volume to go "viral". That said I know about the common link building techniques. I know I can submit guest posts but when you're competing with websites that have over 10,000 backlinks, there is no way I'm going to get close to this with guest posting and commenting on other blogs. One way I found for getting backlinks is to publish interviews. Most of the time, people/businesses you interview like to link to this type of content. Publishing value-added content about other businesses' products or services may get some backlinks in return but not that often. So other than that, can some of you share some "out-of-the-box" link building strategies? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbrault740 -
How do I find the links on my site that link to another one of my pages?
I ran IIS Seo toolkit and it found about 40 pages that I have no idea how they exist. What tool can I use to find out what internal link is linking to them so I can fix them or get rid of them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0 -
How to detect a bad neighborhood links?
I have the feeling that I am suffering from negative seo, so there is a way to get a list of links that should remove in the google disavow links tool ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Valarlf0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0