Will rel=canonical work here?
-
Dear SEOMOZ groupies,
I manage several real estate sites for SEO which we have just taken over. After running the crawl on each I am find 1000's of errors relating to just a few points and wanted to find out either suggestion to fix or if the rel=canonical will resolve it as it is in bulk. Here are the problems...Every property has the following so the more adverts the more errors.
-
each page has a contact agent url. all of these create dup title and content
-
each advert has the same with printer friendly
-
each advert has same with as a favorites page
several other but I think you get the idea.
Help!!! .... suggestions overly welcome
Steve
-
-
Hi Thanks also as very much appreciated. The no 3 is just another url for a user to choose this page to add to a shortlist. Thanks again to you both.
-
I agree with Tom that rel=canonical should work here, but it does depend a bit on the scope and structure of the site. I might actually META NOINDEX the printable versions, as these are usually dead-ends and have no value to search visitors. I'm not entirely sure I understand what (3) is or why it's a separate page.
In general, though, you should get these under control, as it sounds like every advert basically has 4 different URLs. This could dilute your ranking ability and even cause Panda problems.
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks. One question, would it be best to take one of the urls for each prob point to be the target or or use the canonical on all?
Thanks
Steve
-
Hi Steve
I think implementing a canonical tag here is your best course of action, as you have rightly pointed out.
If you have different URL versions of the same page, like you might with the printer version of the pages, implementing the tag will stop Google from indexing any variants of the URL. Only one URL will be indexed and the dynamic URLs will eventually be deindexed. That should solve that particular duplicate content problem.
If you have two different pages that need to exist, but they have similar content, you will need to add a canonical tag to one and add the same canonical tag to the other. By that I mean the second, duplicate page needs to have its tag's URL point to the original. Again, that should prevent it from being indexed.
More information on canonicalisation can be found with the SEOMoz canonical guide.
Hope this helps!
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
-
301 Redirect Url Within a Canonical Tag
So this might sounds like a silly question... A client of mine has a duplicate content issue which will be fixed using canonical tags. We are also providing them with an updated URL structure meaning rwe will be having to do lots of 301 redirects. The URL structure is a much larger task that than the duplicate content so i planned to set up the canonicals first. Then it occurred to me id be updating the canonical tags with the urls from the old structure which brings me to my question. Will the canonical tags with the old urls redirect credit to the new urls with the 301? Or should i just wait until we have the new url structure in place and use these new urls in the canonicals? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Use 301 or rel=canonical
I have a page on my site that is showing in search results at #9. I created another page on my site with the search term in the url. Wondering if I 301 or rel=canonical. Thank you, Kerry
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Cross domain canonical issue
Hello fella SEOs! I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it? Thnx for your precious help guys!
Technical SEO | | SEObandits1 -
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 -
Should I use canonical?
I'm working on a site that sells audio tracks, the site is a Wordpress build. I've got Yoast and XML Sitemaps running for SEO. The site has been developed (not by myself) to use a flash based audio player. Now this player offers the ability to share, sell products etc... The player has been placed on the homepage and the main music catalog page. The main catalog page has had a custom page type created for itself. This page has been created in such a way that if you visit the actual page from dashboard > Pages and add content then no content will appear on the page. Even the page header is pulled from the PHP. So really as far as I am aware no real content is being seen on the page by a search engine. Except the content on the side bars (it has 2 sidebars on either side of the page.) The homepage has an introductory paragraph and header which are editable via the normal method in Wordpress. A custom post type has been created specifically for music items. When a music item is uploaded it is added to the music item feed on the homepage and music catalog pages. It also creates a separate post for the item itself. These items at the moment also have 'no content' as they are only sidebars with a flash music player. I've started to add short paragraphs and headers to them so there is content on the music item posts. I cannot however, in the time frame/budget start entering deeply descriptive content about each item. (I considered adding the intro paragraph from the homepage and using a canonical tag to the homepage on every music item). So here is my question. What do I do with these music items? Do I use canonical and point them toward the music catalog or the homepage? If so which one? I want the homepage or music catalog page to rank well and I am concerned that search engines aren't going to see these most vital parts of the site. I don't think individual items ranking is helpful, so what do i do?!?! The home and catalog pages are the two main pages of the site. I am going to advise a new player, page type etc... be utilised but at the moment I need a solution quickly. Any help will be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | benyamin0 -
Why Do Transparent Networks Still Work
Hi Mozzers, My client has a major competitor that dominates several industry head terms. A check of their link profile reveals that they have 50 low DA domains that are identical to the main site, the only difference being that they all link to the main domain for these terms. They're not even attempting to disguise the network but it works. Can anyone tell me why? See: www.omega.com/vhpc/
Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk0 -
Will Google index a site with white text? Will it give it bad ratings?
Will google not rank a site bc pretty much all the copy is white (and the background is all white)? Here's the site in question: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6w24f6h5p0zaxhg/Garrison_PLAY.vs2-static.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fwudppvwy2khpau/t43NozpG3E/Garrison_PLAY.vs3.jpg thanks--if you need me to clarify more let me know TM Humphries LocalSearched.com
Technical SEO | | CloudGuys0