Rel="canonical" questions?
-
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one.
Thoughts???
-
We put rel=canonical on it. Now there are several other reasons that we have way to many pages indexed. Big project coming soon, I hope!
-
Oh, ouch - yeah that's definitely has potential to spin out of control. I think rel=canonical would actually be great there, because the product page really is 100% duplicated.
-
just read your article
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
The Indexation “Cap”
Similarly, there’s no set “cap” to how many pages of a site Google will index. There does seem to be adynamic limit, though, and that limit is relative to the authority of the site. If you fill up your index with useless, duplicate pages, you may push out more important, deeper pages. For example, if you load up on 1000s of internal search results, Google may not index all of your product pages. Many people make the mistake of thinking that more indexed pages is better. I’ve seen too many situations where the opposite was true. All else being equal, bloated indexes dilute your ranking ability.
I liked it thanks!
-
Just started here about 1 month ago. We are thinking that it is the search causing this issue. We should have it fixed in the next few weeks. For example if you go to http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/search?term=dirt+bikes and then click on the first result. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/p/43/53/210/1157/-/25928/Dirt-Tricks-KTM-Timing-Chain-Tensioner/dirt+bikes it has the search result as part of the url for tracking. I am thinking this could be causing hundreds of thousands of urls. We will turn this into a parametersso they can still track it but google will not index it. Any thoughts on this, or maybe it is to far off topic. Thanks for all your input.
-
I was about to say that 85 sounds significant, but then I noticed that Google has indexed 1.13M pages on your site. For your link profile/authority (which is respectable but still pretty medium-sized) that's a massive index. I strongly suspect you have a ton of duplicate content that's completely unrelated to this. You've probably got bigger fish to fry, honestly.
One thing you might want to look at is your search pagination, as that can easily spin out thousands of pages. Unfortunately, really sorting this out takes a pretty thorough audit.
-
of the first pair (ones like these ttp://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical) around around 15 in each Classification and there are 5 classification so 75.
of the second pair (like this
http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/m/43/53/2/ATV-Parts-KAWASAKI
http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/m/43/72/2/ATV-Accessories-KAWASAKI
) about 17 per classification so 85.
Third level like (http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/v/43/72/10864/ATV-KAWASAKI/BRUTE-FORCE-300-2013 http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/v/43/53/10864/ATV-KAWASAKI/BRUTE-FORCE-300-2013) there are about 1100-1300
-
How many pairs of these duplicates are there across the whole site?
-
I agree one URL would be best; however, they said how the system is set up not really possible right now.
There are only two page that are the same and they are the same here on the next leave down too.
http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/m/43/53/2/ATV-Parts-KAWASAKI
http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/m/43/72/2/ATV-Accessories-KAWASAKI
So you think if there are just two page that are the same it is nothing to worry about? I know adding one or two paragraph of good content not just seo copy to the http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical Having one focus on parts and the other one accessories. I know that is not my ideal situation but a possibility. I would rather just have one URL like you suggested.
Thoughts?
-
Yeah, I think Matthew's right about the duplication - it looks like these are basically landing on the same results. It's not a disaster, but it's certainly going to look like thin content. I guess I'd want to step back and ask if these two paths are really necessary - could they converge on one URL if you're really serving up exactly the same products? The best canonicalization solution is ultimately not to have multiple URLs.
The canonical tag is slightly odd here, just because the pages aren't 100% duplicates, but it's probably fine. Honestly, a lot of it boils down to how many search pages you've got across the site and how many are duplicated. If you're talking about half-a-dozen, it's probably not worth worrying about. If you're talking about hundreds of pages, then cleaning up your architecture and removing these duplicates could have real dividends for SEO (and possibly make life easier for your visitors, too).
-
Your welcome.
Have a great day.
-
Thanks for your input.
-
There are a few things here that I think you should be aware of.
1 if you leave it like that, you will have duplicate content issues, because both of those pages are the same, the pictures are just in different places.
2. The page http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical is a pr3 and the other is a pr1. I would personally keep the pr3 page and 301 redirect the other page to that page so you no longer have those duplicate content issues on your site. That way if you have anyone still visit that page through old links they will still end up on that pr3 page.
3. The url structure, is a bit messy for your site. I generally advise others to have something a long these lines. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/electrical this is an SEO friendly url. I am not saying the ones you have now won't work, it's just a bit messy that's all. Personally though if your getting good traffic to it, I wouldn't mess with it at all. Now if you were just starting out I would say change them asap.
In the future when making new pages, I would set it up to make a proper url structure.
Have a great day.
Matthew Boley
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
-
Rel-canonical vs Href-lang use for an international website.
I have a multi-country website that uses country subfolders to separate countries. When I run a Moz scan, I am getting canonical related alerts (this is probably related to some of our US content being duplicated on the other country websites). Shouldn't I be using href-lang instead since I am telling search engines that a certain article in country B, is just a copy of the same article in country A?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marshdigitalmarketing0 -
Help with Schema & what's considered "Spammy structured markup"
Hello all! I was wondering if someone with a good understanding of schema markup could please answer my question about the correct use so I can correct a penalty I just received. My website is using the following schema markup for our reviews and today I received this message in my search console. UGH... Manual Actions This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Site-wide matches Some manual actions apply to entire site <colgroup><col class="JX0GPIC-d-h"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-x"><col class="JX0GPIC-d-a"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | reversedotmortgage
| | Reason | Affects |
| | Spammy structured markup Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marking up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google's Rich Snippet Quality guidelines. Learn more. | I have used the webmasters rich snippets tool but everything checks out. The only thing I could think of is my schema tag for "product." rather than using a company like tag? (https://schema.org/Corporation). We are a mortgage company so we sell a product it's called a mortgage so I assumed product would be appropriate. Could that even be the issue? I checked another site that uses a similar markup and they don't seem to have any problems in SERPS. http://www.fha.com/fha_reverse shows stars and they call their reviews "store" OR could it be that I added my reviews in my footer so that each of my pages would have a chance at displaying my stars? All our reviews are independently verified and we just would like to showcase them. I greatly appreciate the feedback and had no intentions of abusing the markup. From my site: All Reverse Mortgage 4.9 out of 5 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi | |
| | [https://www.ekomi-us.com/review-reverse.mortgage.html](<a class=)" rel="nofollow" title="eKomi verified customer reviews" target="_BLANK" style="text-decoration:none; font-size:1.1em;"> |
| | ![](<a class=)imgs/rating-bar5.png" /> |
| | |
| | All Reverse Mortgage |
| | |
| | |
| | 4.9 out of 5 |
| | 301 Verified Customer Reviews from eKomi |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |1 -
Best to Fix Duplicate Content Issues on Blog If URLs are Set to "No-Index"
Greetings Moz Community: I purchased a SEMrush subscription recently and used it to run a site audit. The audit detected 168 duplicate content issues mostly relating to blog posts tags. I suspect these issues may be due to canonical tags not being set up correctly. My developer claims that since these blog URLs are set to "no-index" these issues do not need to be corrected. My instinct would be to avoid any risk with potential duplicate content. To set up canonicalization correctly. In addition, even if these pages are set to "no-index" they are passing page rank. Further more I don't know why a reputable company like SEMrush would consider these errors if in fact they are not errors. So my question is, do we need to do anything with the error pages if they are already set to "no-index"? Incidentally the site URL is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com. I am attaching a copy of the SEMrush audit. Thanks, Alan BarjWaO SqVXYMy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Set up a rel canonical
I have a question. I was wondering, if it was possible to set up a rel canonical. When I can't access the non canonical pages? For example, my site as at www.site.com , but the non cannocail is at site.com is their any way to set thet up without actually edting it at site.com ? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
How to remove "Results 1 - 20 of 47" from Google SERP Snippet
We are trying to optimise our SERP snippet in Google to increase CTR, but we have this horrid "Results 1 - 20 of 47" in the description. We feel this gets in the way of the message and so wish to remove it, but how?? Any ideas apart from removing the paging from the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | speedyseo0 -
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 -
So what exactly does Google consider a "natural" link profile?
As part of my company's ongoing SEO effort we have been analyzing our link profile. A colleague of mine feels that we should be targeting at least 50% branded anchor text. He claims this is what search engines consider "natural" and we should not go past a threshold of 50% optimized anchor text to make sure we avoid any penalties or decrease in rankings. 50% brand term anchor text seems too high to me. I pointed out that most of our competitors who outrank us have a much greater percentage of optimized links. I've also read other industry experts state that somewhere in the range of 30% branded anchor text would be considered natural. What percent of branded vs. optimized anchor text do you feel looks "natural" and what do you base your opinion on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeannaTallman0 -
Rel Canonical Syntax
My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally. I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below). Should I be concerned? Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0