Canonicalization - Some advice needed :)
-
Hi guys,
To be honest, it's a little bit embarrassing to throw out this question but it's one of the weakest points of knowledge at the moment for me.
I've tried to get a grasp of canonical URLs and what it all means. From my understanding, it's informing Google which page to take into consideration when there's the possibility for duplicate content. Right?
However, with the site I'm working on I'm not sure if it would be worth putting site-wide and the impact it would have.
Site I'm working on - http://bit.ly/N7eew7
With the nature of the site, there would be a lot of duplicated content as there's the possibility that several properties listed could have a similar address due to being in the same building etc.
From what I can see, no canonical URL was setup on the homepage.
The other variations of the homepage URL are 301 redirecting to thee http:/www. version.
Can someone explain it all to me in simple terms? Honestly believe that I'm getting more confused by the minute.
Thanks guys for your patience
-
Seems like Matt and Marcus have you on the right track. With a real-estate site, duplicates and near-duplicates are very common, since you're adding and removing properties all the time and there are many search options and categories. I do agree that search-friendly URLs, long-term, where each property has a fixed URL, are definitely the best bet. In the meantime, though, a solid canonical structure helps a lot.
Ease into it - don't go sitewide in one fell swoop without a plan, unless you're having clear ranking problems. Start with your biggest problem areas, monitor/measure, and work from there. You can always check for indexed duplicates by running a Google search like:
site:daft.ie intitle:"176 Rathgar Road"
In this case, I'm not seeing any index issues, although I think Matt's concerns are valid.
I'd also consider rel=prev/next for search results pages, as that can help focus Google, too. Again, take it one step at a time and start with the biggest problems. It'll mitigate your risk all around.
-
What's everyones opinion canonicali URL being setup site-wide?
-
Hey, as per the email, it is exactly as above.
We can check the two versions of the URLs.
Confirm they both have the same canonical URL
then check both URLs using the info:URL command in Google to verify that in both instances, with and without final slash, the URL returned as indexed includes the final slash as per the canonical.
Any problems, give me a shout!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus thanks for your help so far. I've emailed you my URL's for a better look at the issue I'm facing.
-
Hi Antonio,
I hope you're well and not pulling your hair out in frustration just yet.
There are a few factors that you need to consider before making a decision on this:
1. Would changing the URL of the post give more traffic through the search engine than you are currently getting?
2. How would this impact the existing links that have been built to the original URL.
Remember that if you are going to change the URL of a page, this will just look like a new webpage to Google. All of the Facebook likes, Google+ +1's, links, etc will be going to the previous URL. Not only that, if you do a 301 redirect to the new URL, you will only transfer some of the link juice that you have made.
URL changes really should be a last resort and need to be thought out properly at the start of the webpage creation. In the case of Mark (above), I have recommended that he change the URLs because they are all dynamic and the benefit of changing these pages vs not, wins.
Let me know the URL of the page in question and I will take a look and tell you what I think.
Matt.
-
Hello Mathew and Mark congrats for the great support and highlights.
In the light of what you are explaning here could you please supoport me in this question concerning Canonical or 301 redirect? My issue is in terms of SEO when doing canolical.
I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines for the length names so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO.
This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115
My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me?
1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical. The duplicate content would still exist!
2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice.
I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name.
Thank you very much for the help,
Antonio
-
Hi Matthew,
Thanks very much for your explanation. I think I get to understand it better now
Many thanks,
Christian
-
Will do - cheers Matthew
I'll probably take you up on that offer.
-
No problem.
I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.
Matt.
-
Hi Matthew, thanks for chipping in.
At the moment we do have canonical URLs setup for property listings such as the example you given above.
We'll still be going ahead with cleaning up the URL structure and ensuring categories following the correct practice as well.
-
Hi Christian,
No, this wouldn't be the case because what you are telling Google there is that "http://www.example.co.uk/properties/search" is the EXACT SAME page as the "/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail/" page.
For the likes of just search pages, you don't need to have canonical URLs because they are just dynamically generated search pages. Where you DO NEED canonical URLs is on the likes of category pages, product pages, etc.
So, in the case of Mark's website, the individual property listing pages (e.g, http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606) need to have a canonical link because you could get to this page that has the EXACT SAME content with a similar URL (i don't know another URL to give the example here but a made up example could be http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606keyword=dublin).
This is why you should have search engine friendly URLs to make it easy to understand which page is which. So having http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/ as the URL instead of http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606 can make life a lot easier.
Has this helped to clear things up a bit?
Matt.
-
Hard to tell for 100% without the proper URLs but I don't think so.
You have one page that works on two different URLs. The page has a canonical tag showing that the http://www.mysite.com/product-a/ is the correct version.
So, in Googles eyes:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-aAre both pointing to:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
Due to the tag:
<link < span="">href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" /> </link <>
There could be a bit more to this picture, if you don't want to post a link on here drop me an email to marcus@bowlerhat.co.uk and ill double check for you.
In an ideal world I would want consistency between URL's, site links and trailing slashes. I.E. If the page resolves on:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a
But is canonicalised to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
I would want a 301 from
http://www.mysite.com/product-a
to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
and all internal links to point to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
That's probably made it more confusing but in essence, nope, I think you are fine.
Cheers
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus
So here's what I've done...
So I've navigated like so:
Campaign>Crawl Diagnostics>Errors (68)>Duplicate Page Content Errors (61)Once this page loads all of the links, I've clicked on one of the links and it shows
1 Error
X Duplicate Page Content
Read MoreClicked on Read More then on the number 2 link that shows under the heading of Other URLs
This displays my two urls:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-aWhen I navigate to this page and view the source code I can see the following code:
href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" />So I'm confused, do I have a duplicate content problem or not?
NB If I remove the trailing slash from my url it will show the same page. It does not do a redirect to the url with the slash. (I've highlighted this to Hubspot and they have said that it is not a problem?)
-
I don't believe that SEOMoz reports cover canonicalised links.
Simple test:
- Grab one page that has duplicate problems according to the report
- grab all duplicates from the spreadsheet
- Check the canonical on all
Mark - this is the same problem you will run into that I was trying to highlight above.
Marcus
-
I'm trialling seoMoz at the moment and so far I have 61 duplicate content crawl errors showing in one of my campaigns. This has sent me running to my CMS provider (Hubspot) to query this.
They've advised me that they automatically sort out canonicalisation.So I'm left in a state of not knowing where to focus.
Are Hubspot wrong or are the seoMoz reports broken?
-
Hi Christian,
That's a really good question - Can anyone shed any light on this one?
Personally I would have made the URL you mentioned be the canonical one.
But seeing I'm here asking for advice on it, maybe someone else would be better placed to help.
-
Well, you know, my dear old mother used to say an ounce of SEO prevention is worth a pound of SEO cure. Catch you later Mark.
-
Hi Mark and Marcus,
Sorry for jumping in your discussion; if i have URLs like below:
/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial
/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail
does this mean that my canonical will be:
?
Many thanks for your help.
~Christian
-
Thanks Marcus - Agreed
Once URL structure has been improved, I will look into ensuring that specific property pages have canonical URLs and all relevant categories are appropriate setup as well.
Quite a bit of work to do but it should be worth it in the long term for the business.
-
Hi Mark,
No problem.
Yes, you are correct to assume that. For each of the property listings you would need to do this (just like the example that Marcus has given below).
I think that all areas of the website should really conform to these search engine friendly URLs. It may take quite a bit of time, but it will help you avoid a lot of issues in the future (which I can guarantee you would have).
Matt.
-
Yep, for sure, just beware it may still report duplication problems after you add the canonical URL so you will need to give it a manual once over. This is 100% worth doing though.
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus,
Just problems with the Moz tools.
We haven't been affected at all by any algorithm changes so far.
I still think it would be best to follow best practice going forward. I've just began work on this site and want to get to the root of any underlying problems.
Cheers,
Mark
-
Hey Mark
Are you having real world issues or just problems within the Moz tools?
I have feeling they don't factor canonicalisation at the moment (which sucks a bit) so you will do well to export the report to a spreadsheet and check them off manually.
Glad it was helpful!
Marcus
-
Marcus, thank you for giving such clear examples to me. It's a great help.
I'm a little bit embarrassed by the fact that it was causing such confusion up until now but it's clear to me now what needs to be changed.
With SEOMoz Campaign setup for the site, we have been receiving many duplicate content errors.
Hopefully the use of correct canonical URLs should help to eliminate many of the problems we have been having.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the advice
Optimization of the URL structure is certainly something which I'm focusing on at the moment.
Taking on-board what you have mentioned, with the URL structure replaced, I presume that similar canonicals would need to be setup on each property listing to avoid duplicate content?
Do you think it's an issue which I should look into for other areas of the site as well?
Apologies for my questions. As you can guess, I'm trying to get to the root of any issues we're having with duplicate content.
Many thanks,
Mark
-
Hey Mark
In simple terms, the canonical URL exists as a suggestion to Google that a page may have various URLs or that various URLs may contain similar or near duplicate content.
For instance:
Lets say we have a list of properties in Birmingham, UK and that we have 3 pages showing that list of properties - the first by date order, the second by price high to low, the third by price low to high.
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=hightolow
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=lowtohigh
This is a perfect time to use the canonical URL as the content is the same, it is just jiggled around a little so all of these would set the default page as the canonical.
default page: http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php
So, all pages would have this tag:
Then, Google knows that from a search and indexation perspective, they can return the one main version of this page and the others are just the same thing jumbled around a bit.
This is also a good, solid overview with a video and a basic explanation:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Mark,
I hope you're well.
Basically, the canonical tag is used to let Google know which URL it should refer to as the original source of the page content. So, if you had the following URLs that all go to the homepage:
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/home/Then Google could crawl each of these pages and identify them as three different pages all with the same content. This could say to them that there is duplicate content on the site (which is not good). Usually with the homepage Google is intelligent enough to understand that there is just one page and the /index.php for example isn't a duplicate.
The problem that you do face, especially on the site that you are optimising, is with the different pages that have information on the lettings, etc (i.e. your product pages). For example, if you look at the following URL on your website:
http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606
This is when you go through to the short-term searches and then I find the '176 Rathgar Road' apartment. Due to the dynamically generated URL (search.shortterm.daft?id=23606) I can gather that there would be several ways to get to this page with a different URL. My first suggestion would be to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs, for example, instead of having 'http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606', it would be:
http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/
This way you could clearly optimise the page on Google search and have the canonical link to the page as:
href="http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment.html" rel="canonical" />
This would improve the SEO performance on the website and avoid duplicate content issues.
I hope this helps, but if you need any more info then just let me know.
Matt.
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
-
Should I canonicalize URLs with no query params even though query params are always automatically appended?
There's a section of my client's website that presents quarterly government financial data. Users can filter results to see different years and quarters of financial info. If a user navigates to those pages, the URLs automatically append the latest query parameters. It's not a redirect...when I asked a developer what the mechanism was for this happening, he said "magic." He honestly didn't know how to describe it. So my question is, is it ok to canonicalize the URL without any query parameters, knowing that the user will always be served a page that does have query parameters? I need to figure out how to manage all of the various versions of these URLs.
Technical SEO | | LeahH0 -
What rich snippet etc do I need for this
I attach a screenshot after searching "Mashable". Would appreciate a pointer in the right direction to add this for my site. 71VZEJX
Technical SEO | | Jonathan19790 -
Deal with links that need login to view
Hi All, Deal with links that need login to view We have member names in the site in many places and when clicked it takes the user to the login page As just logged in members can view the details The redirection type is 302 and Moz Campaign says we have many and need to make them 301 What is the best way as we have a drupal website Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
How to do ip canonicalization ?
Hi , my website is opening with IP too. i think its duplicate content for google...only home page is opening with ip, no other pages, how can i fix it?, might be using .htaccess i am able to do...but don't know proper code for this...this website is on wordpress platform... Thanks Ramesh
Technical SEO | | unibiz0 -
I have been Hit with UNWANTED Links and I need to know how to remove them?
I have been looking at Google Webmasters Tools and saw that suddenly I have this huge amount of links form an unknown source “SiteLoki” never heard of it? Didn’t want it! Need to get rid of it!
Technical SEO | | rdominey
My Website www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of presence on Google about three weeks ago. I first thought it was something to do with the new Google Algorithm. I also contacted Google to be re-evaluated. They replied:
Reconsideration request for http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/: No manual spam actions foundMay 10, 2012 Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/,
We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.getyourphotosoncanvas.com/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. - - - - - -
We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team.
Google Search Quality Team I have ran all kinds of web crawl tests, Google webmaster, talked with SEO “Experts” and still can not figure out what is happening. I decided to use a couple of SEOmoz tools to try to help me explain what is happening. I figured that if I could take a very specific and unique KeyPhrase and run it on a specific page that I might be able to better explain what is happening. Basically, We appear to be no longer searchable by key words or phrases on google?
There was another post regarding canonical tag issues; resolved, I removed all canonical tags for now. Today I discovered the links and I suspect that having even
1 link for this website will penalize you in Google. Here are some Webmaster Tools pages for reference: I also noted that the image for the link is from an old site hosted on www.Globat.com. I don't know what that significance might be. I left them in January. Thanks in advance for any help and advice you can offer, Ray Webmaster-Tools-Query_Your-Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photo-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Query_Photos-On-Canvas.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki.jpg Webmaster-Tools-Links_siteloki_links.jpg0 -
Duplicate page content issue needs resolution.
After my last "crawl" report, I received a warning about "duplicate page content". One page was: http://anycompany.com and the other was: http://anycompany.com/home.html How do I correct this so these pages aren't competing with each other or is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | JamesSagerser0 -
Well, I need some help, advice, something.
Hey all, I'm new to the SEOmoz thing but I like it so far. I think I have my site listing so messed up that it's effecting my rank. I have 3 domains. 1.) rt112media.com 2.) route112media.com 3.) route112.net. Each domain was purchased through GoDaddy.com and still remain there. I have my own hosting account which I was registered as rt112media.com with route112media.com and route112.net listed as add on domains. Technically, I would like for my main site to be route112media.com for everything. However when I registered the site as rt112media.com I didn't know the issues I would have as far as different domains so I registered with rt112media.com as my main domain name. Anyways, as of now I have rt112media.com as my main domain through my cpanel hosting.I have both domains route112media.com and route112.net set for 301 wildcard redirects to rt112media.com on my hosting account and my GoDaddy account. When I started my WMT account I didn't really know which domain to use cause I figured I could link them all to one. So, I signed up as routet12media.com. After a little while I realized it was not recieving anything because everything was being redirected to rt112media.com Anyways both addresses have been crawled and indexed so they are showing as two. So, I requested to change the route112media.com address to rt112media.com in WMT. That was about 2 weeks ago and it is still pending request. I'm not having further problems with WMT because of the www.rt112media.com vs http://rt112media.com. I am the verified owner of both but I can not switch the www.rt112media account to show the non www. account as the main one because I have the other pending. My site is still being crawled as 2 versions rt112media.com and route112media.com. So what is my best option? And what would be the worst cause scenario if I wanted to start completely over using route112media.com as my main domain with hosting and all. Sorry this was so long I just wanted to explain my situation. I'm lost. Any advice would be appreciated! http:/rt112media.com
Technical SEO | | Route112Media0 -
Very, very confusing behaviour with 301s. Help needed!
Hi SEOMoz gang! Been a long timer reader and hangerouter here but now i need to pick your brains. I've been working on two websites in the last few days which are showing very strange behaviour with 301 redirects. Site A This site is an ecommerce stie stocking over 900 products and 000's of motor parts. The old site was turned off in Feb 2011 when we built them a new one. The old site had terrible problems with canonical URLs where every search could/would generate a unique ID e.g. domain.com/results.aspx?product=1234. When you have 000's of products and Google can find them it is a big problem. Or was. We launche the new site and 301'd all of the old results pages over to the new product pages and deleted the old results.aspx. The results.aspx page didn't index or get shown for months. Then about two months again we found some certain conditions which would mean we wouldn't get the right 301 working so had to put the results.aspx page back in place. If it found the product, it 301'd, if it didn't it redirected to the sitemap.aspx page. We found recently that some bizarre scenerio actually caused the results.aspx page to 200 rather than 301 or 404. Problem. We found this last week after our 404 count in GWMT went up to nearly 90k. This was still odd as the results.aspx format was of the OLD site rather than the new. The old URLs should have been forgetten about after several months but started appearing again! When we saw the 404 count get so high last week, we decided to take severe action and 301 everything which hit the results.aspx page to the home page. No problem we thought. When we got into the office on Monday, most of our product pages had been dropped from the top 20 placing they had (there were nearly 400 rankings lost) and on some phrases the old results.aspx pages started to show up in there place!! Can anyone think why old pages, some of which have been 301'd over to new pages for nearly 6 months would start to rank? Even when the page didn't exist for several months? Surely if they are 301's then after a while they should start to get lost in the index? Site B This site moved domain a few weeks ago. Traffic has been lost on some phrases but this was mainly due to old blog articles not being carried forward (what i'll call noisy traffic which was picked up by accident and had bad on page stats). No major loss in traffic on this one but again bizarre errors in GWMT. This time pages which haven't been in existence for several YEARS are showing up as 404s in GWMT. The only place they are still noted anywhere is in the redirect table on our old site. The new site went live and all of the pages which were in Googles index and in OpenSiteExplorer were handled in a new 301 table. The old 301s we thought we didn't need to worry about as they had been going from old page to new page for several years and we assumed the old page had delisted. We couldn't see it anywhere in any index. So... my question here is why would some old pages which have been 301'ing for years now show up as 404s on my new domain? I've been doing SEO on and off for seven years so think i know most things about how google works but this is baffling. It seems that two different sites have failed to prevent old pages from cropping up which were 301d for either months or years. Does anyone has any thoughts as to why this might the case. Thanks in advance. Andy Adido
Technical SEO | | Adido-1053990