Are my canonical re directs working?
-
Buonjourno from Wetherby UK
Ive been battlling sometime to get this site http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk to rank for term Right To Manage. Amongst other tactics ive set up a canonical
- http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/about/right-to-manage.aspx * - Canonical version
http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/how-we-care-for-you/right-to-manage.aspx
http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/what-our-customers-say/right-to-manage.aspx
http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/ -
But has this canonical redirect feature worked? The reason i doubt it is i notice when i enter a page http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/what-our-customers-say/right-to-manage.aspx which has the below code in place:
rell="canonical" href="http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/About/right-to-manage.aspx/" />
It does not jump to http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/about/right-to-manage.aspx
So my question is...
"is the canonical redirect working or not & waht is the best way / tool for diagnosing a canonical error"
Grazie tanto,
David -
You're welcome David
Hope some of that helped.
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
thank you fir taking time out to look at this again Ive 301 redirect the rogue urls and the souble ll in rel was a typo i passed into my post & mercifully wasnt on the live site.
Thanks again,
David
-
If you pulled that code off your page, you have spelt 'rel' wrong.
But as I already said, rel canonical is not a redirect - a 301 is a redirect. Rel canonical is a suggestion to Google with a preferred page meant for those times when - but if they look at what you are doing, you have very little chance of that working as it stands.
Are you not able to re-write the duplicate content or remove it altogether? Perhaps even think about no-indexing those pages.
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
Yes i know its duplicate conent thats why i added the canonical re directs.
So my question is...
"is the canonical redirect working or not & waht is the best way / tool for diagnosing a canonical error"
Thanks,
David
-
Hi Andy,
Yes i know its duplicate conent thats why i added the canonical re directs.
So my question is...
"is the canonical redirect working or not & waht is the best way / tool for diagnosing a canonical error"
Thanks,
David
-
Just to ad ive just decided to ad 301 redirects to bury this problem hopefully permanently
-
A rel=canonical is only a suggestion to Google for which page is the preferred one to deliver the content, so there is never any guarantee that they will deliver content.
However, what I see are 3 pages of identical content - you shouldn't be too surprised to hear that this is duplication and as such, very unlikely that Google is going to rank those pages at all.
I would consider a change of tact that includes removing the duplicate content.
Andy
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
-
Does Canonical Tag Syntax Matter?
Does anyone know definitively if the format of the canonical tag matters? Silly question I know. vs
Technical SEO | | Healio0 -
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop. Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
Technical SEO | | zasite0 -
If you use canonicals do the meta descriptions need to be different?
For example, we have 3 different subsites with the same pages. We will put canonicals so they reference the main pages. Do the meta descriptions have to be different for each of the three pages? How does Google handle meta data when using canonicals?
Technical SEO | | Shirley.Fenlason0 -
Canonical URLs in an eCommerce site
We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..
Technical SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Rel="canonical"
Hello guys, By fixing the duplicate meta description issues of my site I noticed something a bit weird.The pages are product pages and the product on each one of them is the same and the only difference is the length of the product. On each page there is a canonical tag, and the link within the tag points to the same page. www.example.com/Product/example/2001 <rel="canonical" href="www.example.com/Product/example/2001"></rel="canonical"> This happens on every other page. I read twice and I think I will do it again the post on GWT and I think that is wrong as it should point to a different url, which is www.example.com/ProductGroup/example/ which is the the page where all the product are grouped together. Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
Technical SEO | | erhansimavi0 -
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 -
Canonical usage and duplicate content
Hi We have a lot of pages about areas like ie. "Mallorca" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca), with tabbed pages like "excursion" (domain.com/spain/Mallorca/excursions) and "car rental" (domain.com/Spain/Mallorca/car-rental) etc. The text on ie the "car rental"-page is very similar on Mallorca and Rhodos, and seomoz marks these as duplicate content. This happens on "car rental", "map", "weather" etc. which not have a lot of text but images and google maps inserted. Could i use rel=nex/prev/canonical to gather the information from the tabbed pages? That could show google that the Rhodos-map page is related to Rhodos and not Mallorca. Is that all wrong or/and is there a better way to do this? Thanks, Alsvik
Technical SEO | | alsvik0