When to use canonical urls
-
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls.
I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not.
I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page.
Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page?
Thanks
Paul
-
Thumbing up both answers - I think they've got you covered. This is definitely a situation where you should try to sort out why the deeper page is ranking. It could be a positive that you should try to encourage (disrupting that could harm your ranking, ultimately) or it could signal something about your home-page that needs work.
Rand had a good post a while back on the subject:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
-
Thanks for the replies, that has really cleared it up, I think I just need to look deeper into the pages layout to see exactly why Google is deciding to rank this particular page.
Thanks
Paul
-
Hello,
That is not the purpose of the canonical tag. You should not attempt to use canonical tag to fix this sort of problem. The general purpose of the canonical tag is to filter dynamic urls to a single root page.
Example
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=L&color=Red
www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face?size=XL&color=BlueCanonical to www.myclothingstore.com/mens/t-shirts/smiley-face
In this example the only difference of these pages is the size & color selected. The page is the same, the parameters are different. So by putting a canonical tag on this page, you help the search engine filter out the dynamic urls and rank the canonical tag.
It sounds like you may have an issue with Keyword Cannibalization, or it could simply be that your inner page is much better for the keyword then the homepage.
I'm sure somebody here would be happy to assist you further if we could take a look at the 2 pages in question and the exact keyword that you're using in Google.
Hope this helps
-
Hey Paul
Hmmm, that might work, but really, that is far from the ideal approach here and it might make sense to try and understand what is causing that page to rank over the homepage.
Have you checked
- keywords targeted on each page
- optimisation of pages for keyword
- internal anchor text (navigation + pages)
- External links
Planning and consistency is just so important that I would recommend trying to get a handle on why one page over another is ranking rather than just trying to put a hack in place to try and redirect folks to the right page.
Canonical is really for clearing up any uncertainty regarding different URLs for a single page. So, if you have.
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/
www.yoursite.co.uk/blog/index.htmlYou could set the canonical to the one your prefer and then any links or search results would be allocated to the correct varation. It is not really for saying one page is really a copy of another but it can be used like that if there are near duplicates but really noindex may be a better solution for non search based landing pages that are very close in content to another page.
As ever, there are lots of moving parts and without an example it's hard to say but in principle, I would try to figure out what is going on here and adjust the pages + set up canonical as they should be used.
Hope that helps!
MarcusSome useful references
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemapshttp://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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
-
Some URLs in the sitemap not indexed
Our company site has hundreds of thousands of pages. Yet no matter how big or small the total page count, I have found that the "URLs Indexed" in GWMT has never matched "URLS in Sitemap". When we were small and now that we have a LOT more pages, there is always a discrepancy of ~10% or so missing from the index. It's difficult to know which pages are not indexed, but I have found some that I can verify are in the Sitemap.xml file but not at all in the index. When I go to GWMT I can "Fetch and Render" missing pages fine - it's not as though it's blocked or inaccessible. Any ideas on why this is? Is this type of discrepancy typical?
Technical SEO | | Mase0 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tjhossy0 -
How do I properly use the canonical tag to avoid negative effect from having identical content on 2 url’s?
To illustrate… I have same website uploaded at 2 locations (url’s). Only the domain extensions are different. www.myexample.com
Technical SEO | | swiftseo
www.myexample.org The benefit is that I may run some promos on one location and not the other to help in product surveys/testing. The website content is 98% identical and I understand this content duplication may cause SEO problems. The domain I wish to use for rankings etc is www.myexample.com 1) How do I go about avoiding seo problem? Do I need to place the canonical tag at www.myexample.org ie 2) Do I also place the exact same tag at the .com location or not necessary there? Is there an alternative or more effective option to resolving the problem?0 -
Disallowing https URLs
It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Keywords in Vanity URL
If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site. For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0 -
Canonical Tag Pointing To The Same URL
Does it matter if a canonical tag points to the URL in which the tag is on? Example Page: http://www.domain.com Canonical tag: rel="canonical" href="http://www.domain.com" /> I only ask because a client of mine has a CMS that automatically does that to every page on the site and there's no way to remove it. Will this have a negative impact or does it not matter at all? Any insights would be great because I can't find a clear answer anywhere online. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Using the Canonical Tag
Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0