How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
-
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point?
In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b?
I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later.
Thanks!
-
Thanks Ryan. I realize the goal is to not redo them, but we had to put in place some pretty in depth plumbing changes on the site to support canonicals, and I suspect we might make a few tweaks once we see how things play out. I think I really needed a confidence boost that canonicals are only semi-permanent. Thanks a lot!
-
If you decide to change things later you can update your canonical tags and/or use a 301 redirect. Based on the information on the Google webmasters blog, it appears they consider the canonical tag on every crawl. You can read more from Google on it here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
Of course, just because you can change it doesn't mean you should. Switching them around will probably cause a period in which Google is unsure of the actual canonical page, and you may see a drop in rankings while it is sorted out.
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
-
Will "repurposing" a keyword on our website affect rankings gained over time?
Hi team! Thinking of "repurposing" a keyword on our website. Reason: when researching this particular keyword, GMS are quite high, however, the new content we're creating is more up to date, better in general, than the old content this keyword is attached to. How will this affect rankings we've gained over time? (i.e., will any "age" benefits gained as that keyword has been in use on our website for a few years, be lost?) Will Google see the keyword/URL as totally new because it's attached to new content/something that has gone live recently? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MariaPuche-Jimenez_Parker0 -
Can adding "noindex" help with quality penalizations?
Hello Moz fellows, I have another question about content quality and Panda related penalization. I was wondering this: If I have an entire section of my site that has been penalized due to thin content, can adding "noindex,follow" to all pages belonging to that section help de-penalizing the rest of the site in the short term, while we work to improve those penalized pages, which is going to take a long time? Can that be considered a "short term solution" to improve the overall site scoring on Google index while we work to improve those penalized pages, and, once ready, we remove the "noindex" tag? I am eager to know your thoughts on this possible strategy. Thank you in advance to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Canonical page 1 and rel=next/prev
Hi! I'm checking a site that has something like a News section, where they publish some posts, quite similar to a blog.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
They have a canonical url pointing to the page=1. I was thinking of implementing the rel=next/ prev and the view all page and set the view all page as the canonical. But, as this is not a category page of an ecommerce site, and it would has more than 100 posts inside in less than a year, It made me think that maybe the best solution would be the following Implementing rel=next/prev
Keep page 1 as the canonical version. I don't want to make the users wait for a such a big page to load (a view all with more than 100 elements would be too much, I think) What do you think about this solution? Thank you!0 -
Canonical or No-index
Just a quick question really. Say I have a Promotions page where I list all current promotions for a product, and update it regularly to reflect the latest offer codes etc. On top of that I have Offer announcement posts for specific promotions for that product, highlighting very briefly the promotion, but also linking back to the main product promotion page which has a the promotion duplicated. So main page is 1000+ words with half a dozen promotions, the small post might be 200 words, and quickly become irrelevant as it is a limited time news article. Now, I don't want the promotion page indexed (unless it has a larger news story attached to the promotion, but for this purpose presume it is doesn't). Initially the core essence of the post will be duplicated in the main Promotion page, but later as the offer expires it wouldn't be. Therefore would you Rel Canonical or just simply No-index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheWebMastercom0 -
Why are "noindex" pages access denied errors in GWT and should I worry about it?
GWT calls pages that have "noindex, follow" tags "access denied errors." How is it an "error" to say, "hey, don't include these in your index, but go ahead and crawl them." These pages are thin content/duplicate content/overly templated pages I inherited and the noindex, follow tags are an effort to not crap up Google's view of this site. The reason I ask is that GWT's detection of a rash of these access restricted errors coincides with a drop in organic traffic. Of course, coincidence is not necessarily cause. Should I worry about it and do something or not? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links. Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up? I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up... Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfgmedia0 -
Alternative to rel canonical?
Hello there, we have a problem. Let's say we have a website www.mainwebsite.com Then you have 40 websites like this: www.retailer1.mainwebsite.com www.retailer2.mainwebsite.com www.retailer3.mainwebsite.com www.retailer4.mainwebsite.com www.retailer5.mainwebsite.com www.retailer6.mainwebsite.com … an so on In order to avoid the duplicate content penalty from Google we've added a rel="canonical" in each 40 sub-websites mapping each page of them to www.mainwebsite.com Our issue is that now, all our retailers (each owner of www.retailer-X.mainwebsite.com) are complaining about the fact that they are disappeared from Google. How can we avoid to use rel="canonical" in the sub-website and not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in www.mainwebsite.com? Many thanks, all your advices are much appreciated. YESdesign team
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0 -
Does rel canonical need to be absolute?
Hi guys and gals, Our CMS has just been updated to its latest version which finally adds support for rel=canonical. HUZZAH!!! However, it doesn't add the absolute URL of the page. There is a base ref tag which looks like <base <="" span="">href="http://shop.confetti.co.uk/" /> On a page such as http://shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-favours the canonical tag looks like rel="canonical" href="/branch/wedding-favours" /> Does Google recognise this as a legitimate canonical tag? The SEOmoz On-Page Report Card doesn't recognise it as such. Any help would be great, Thanks in advance, Brendan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0