Canonical Tags?
-
I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content. The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly) are ranking higher than the "good URL" links.
So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop. I even read that google might even completely overlook the links. I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Boo
-
We strongly suspect that canonical tags lose a portion of link "juice" just like 301s do. Otherwise, they could be abused.
-
I can't debate one thing - we certainly don't have all the information, and that can lead to bad advice at times.
I disagree on a couple of points:
(1) User-friendly URLs can have both usability and SEO advantages, whether or not they're meant to be typed in directly. Typically, those advantages are minor, but descriptive URLs can certainly boost SEO a small degree.
(2) If your URLs have spaces in them, they are probably being converted in some cases to "%20" (that's the URL-encoded equivalent of a space). It's generally a bad idea to have internal URLs with spaces, and this can lead to minor problems. This explanation sounds a little dubious to me. I'd highly recommend you run an internal crawl with a tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog - you might turn up badly formed internal URLs. I can't prove that, but I'd check if it were me. Hyphens don't "turn into" spaces.
Overall, this reads to me like a list of excuses, not solutions.
-
Jake Madison mentioned this one time.
Any Redirect will lose value. A 301 loses a portion of your juice and a 302 gives you nothing. What the canonical tag does is redirect the authority of the page with the tag to the target page you want to hold the authority (usually the parent page, be it Root Domain, primary landing page or a subcategory page)
Google has a new fantastic tool I think everyone should know about called Google Tag Manager. It creates a container under the that you can fill with any tag, Google or non-Google tags. It is fantastic because you don't need your programer to go in and change anything and no need to access code. It gives the power to you to add and remove tags and define the parameters of each one you put in place. in addition it builds the tag for you if you aren't a code wizard. this makes the world of SEO and OSO shake due to the rainbows and sunshine of not having t bother your programer with little fixes like tag adding and removal.
I hope this helped!
Cheers!
-
Here is what my computer programmer told me...what do you think? (I was mistaken and thought the links were from our advanced search option but they are just links from other sites that are more authoritative than ours I guess. There's a few things here to address, I'm going to try to put it simply. If you want more details I can expound on it:
I think you aren't giving enough information here, and it could potentially cause people to give you bad advice. First off, URLs (generally speaking) aren't meant to be user friendly, unless the user is going to actually type it in. In your case, URLs with %20 in them are never meant to be typed, so it doesn't matter. Second, we don't supply URLs from the site using %20, so we can't do anything about those anyways. One possibility is that websites who are linking to yours have an algorithm that converts hyphens to spaces... and spaces get converted to %20 by many browsers and other internet services.
Second: Don't forget that when we first built the site, we didn't have the vanity URLs (the specialty names)... so the category links with the hyphens-turned-spaces-turned-%20 could very well just be happening because those pages are so much older than the vanity URLs, also, our outbound feeds used to use the old URLs too, so if we provided a feed to a site with those links, and they haven't bothered to update, then those links are still going to be out there. Google sees the links on your site, but they also see the links that come inbound from other sites, and that's why google still has the old URLs listed. The best way to fix this is to use the canonical meta link, to explain to google that the authoritative source is the vanity URL.
-
I tend to agree - these pages are often very low-value for Google and can spin out of control. The canonical tag is a great way to conslidate unavoidable duplicates, but in many cases it's better not to create them at all. Of course, these situations can be very complex, and it's tough to speak in generalities.
-
By search pages, I'm assuming these are automated pages being generated by users searching for things on your site? Pages like these can be seen as 'thin content' and could lead to a penalty from Google.
Also, the question to ask yourself is why are these pages outranking your actual content? Is it because you're linking to them more prominently? Then you'll want to improve your internal linking. Is it because they have a lot of content? Then add more content to your main pages. Is it because they target keywords that your main content doesn't? Then create content around the keywords that people are searching for.
-
Takeshi,
If I no index my higher ranking search links then I will not be ranked as high in google because those will fall completely off right. Are you saying just noindex them...let them fall out of the rankings and then focus long term on getting the main pages ranked above the search pages in order to avoid panda penalties. (I didn't even know I was doing anything wrong)
Boo
-
You want to use a canonical tag on your site if you have any duplicate content. The canonical tag basically tells Google and other search engines which version of the page is the original, or canonical version of the content.
If you're generating a lot of URLs via your search feature, that sounds like it may be a different problem than having a lot of duplicate content. Autogenerating a content via search results is always a risky proposition, which can get you more traffic in the short term, but could get you hit by Panda if it gets out of hand.
My advice would be to noindex the pages generated through search, and create actual high quality content pages for the queries you seem to be getting a lot of traffic for.
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 use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**
I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo0 -
Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
Hi We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself! Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henya0 -
Rel=prev/next and canonical tags on paginated pages?
Hi there, I'm using rel="prev" and rel="next" on paginated category pages. On 1st page I'm also setting a canonical tag, since that page happens to get hits to an URL with parameters. The site also uses mobile version of pages on a subdomain. Here's what markup the 1st desktop page has: Here's what markup the 2nd desktop page has: Here's what markup the 1st MOBILE page has: Here's what markup the 2nd MOBILE page has: Questions: 1. On desktop pages starting from page 2 to page X, if these pages get traffic to their versions with parameters, will I'll have duplicate issues or the canonical tag on 1st page makes me safe? 2. Should I use canonical tags on mobile pages starting from page 2 to page X? Are there any better solutions of avoiding duplicate content issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poiseo1 -
Canonical Rel .uk and .au to .com site?
Hi guys, we have a client whose main site is .com but who has a .co.uk and a com.au site promoting the same company/brand. Each site is verified locally with a local address and phone but when we create content for the sites that is universal, should I rel=canonical those pages on the .co.uk and .com.au sites to the .com site? I saw a post from Dr. Pete that suggests I should as he outlines pretty closely the situation we're in: "The ideal use of cross-domain rel=canonical would be a situation where multiple sites owned by the same entity share content, and that content is useful to the users of each individual site." Thanks in advance for your insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wcbuckner0 -
301 to trailing slash version then canonical
Hi Mozzers I'm just doing an audit for a client and see that all non-trailing-slash URLs are 301'd to trailing-slash URLS. So far so good. But then all the trailing-slash URLs are canonicalled back to the non-trailing-slash URLs. This feels wrong to me, but is it? Never come across this before. Should the canonicals just be removed? Any help much appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Canonical Tags & Search Bots
Does anyone know for sure if search engine bots still crawl links on a page whose canonical tags are set to a different page? So in short, would it be similar to a no-index follow? Thanks! -Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Index.php canonical/dup issues
Hello my fellow SEOs! I would LOVE some additional insight/opinions on the following... I have a client who is an industry leader, big site, ranks for many competitive phrases, blah blah..you get the picture. However, they have a big dup content/canonical issue. Most pages resolve with and without the /index.php at the end of the URL. Obviously this is a dup content issue but more importantly they SEs sometimes serve an "index.php" version of the page, sometimes they don't, and it is constantly changing which version it serves and the rank goes up and down. Now, I've instructed them that we are going to need to write a sitewide redirect to attempt a uniform structure. Most people would say, redirect to the non index.php version buttttt 1. The index.php pages consistently outperforms the non index.php versions, except the homepage. 2. The client really would prefer to have the "index.php" at the end of the URL The homepage performs extremely well for a lot of competitive phrases. I'd like to redirect all pages to the "index.php" version except the homepage and I'm thinking that if I redirect all pages EXCEPT the homepage to the index.php version, it could cause some unforeseen issues. I can not use rel=canonical because they have many different versions of the their pages with different country codes in the URL..example, if I make the US version canonical, it will hurt the pages trying to rank with a fr URL, de URL, (where fr/de are country codes in the URL depending where the user is, it serves the correct version). Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0 -
HTML5 and using multiple H1 tags
Hi All, Our dev team have just asked me a very interesting question........ Within the context of an HTML5 page, where it is supported and encouraged to use multiple H1 tags, will the use of multiple H1 tags be detrimental to SEO? or does Google fully understand how HTML5 works and therefore not penalise a website for using multiple H1 tags? I have an opinion on this that if it helps usability and user experience then it is likely that it will be good for SEO. It would be really good to hear views of people who have tried this or have decided against it! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | A_Q0