Canonicals
-
We have a client that has his products listed on 20+ different websites, including 4 of his own. Also, he only has 1 of everything, so once he sells it then the product is gone.
To battle this duplication issue, plus having a short internet lifespan of less than 4 weeks, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to canonical the products back to the category page. Kind of like using canonical tags on your "used blue widget" and "used red widget" pages back to the "used widgets" page.
Would this help with the duplicate content issues?
Is this a proper use of a canonical?
-
It would help to use the canonicals as you describe and it is proper the way you mention, but because the products are up for only 4 weeks, the new pages probably don't even have time to rank. It would be kind of a moo point
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLwYpSCrlHU
You need to probably focus on category pages that might point to the items as those will be more static and can build rank. They can point to the "sold" archive item page and then when a new item comes up will already have rank on the related category to make the sale. We have used this on job boards as it works the same. Any given job will be posted for 1 month at the most, but the category page of $type job in $city will rank for that key phrase and then point people towards the ever changing job listings. Not sure what you are selling, but think about how you might be able to setup an evergreen type of topic page that people would search for related to your products and focus on that.
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
-
Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
Technical SEO | | kirupa
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one:0 -
Canonical tag or 301
Hi, Our crawl report is showing duplicate content. some of the report I am clear about what to do but on others I am not. Some of the duplicate content arises with a 'theme=default' on the end of the URL. Is this version of a page necessary for people to see when they visit the site (like a theme=print page is) in which case I think we should use a canonical tag, or is it not necessary in which case we should use a 301? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Rel = prev next AND canonical?
I have product category pages that correctly have the prev next but the moz crawl is giving me duplicate content errors. I would not think I also need to have canonical - but do I ?
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Canonical warnings
[1] My site development tool (XSP) has recently added the canonical reference as an auto-generated tag, so every page of my site now has it. Why is SEOmoz warning me that I have hundreds of pages of canonicals if it's supposed to be a GOOD thing? [2] Google is still seeing the pages without the canonical tag because that's how they were indexed. Will they eventually get purged from their index, or should I be proactive about that, and if so, how? Thanks for any input.
Technical SEO | | PatioLifeStyle0 -
Cross-Domain Canonical - Should I use it under the following circumstances?
I have a number of hyper local directories, where businesses get a page dedicated to them. They can add images and text, plus contact info, etc. Some businesses list on more than one of these directory sites, but use exactly the same description. I've tried asking businesses to use unique text when listing on more than one site to avoid duplication issues, but this is proving to be too much work for the business owner! Can I use a cross-domain canonical and point Google towards the strongest domain from the group of directories? What effects will this have? And is there an alternative way to deal with the duplicate content? Thanks - I look forward to hearing your ideas!
Technical SEO | | cmaddison0 -
How does a sitemap affect the definition of canonical URLs?
We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | emilyburns0 -
Canonical for non-exist URL ?
Hi I have a website what has parameter URL. For example www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2 I want that search engine see my page URL as; www.example.com/toys/cars But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page. If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?
Technical SEO | | SEMTurkey0