Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
-
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain.
We have set up different rel="alternative codes like:
The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com?
For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to:
Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html -
I'm honestly not completely clear on what the different URLs are for - I'd just add a note to keep the core difference between canonical and 301s in mind. A canonical tag only impacts Google, and eventually, search results. A 301 impacts all visitors (and moves them to the other page). A lot of people get hung up on the SEO side, but the two methods are very different for end-users.
As Tom said, if these variations have no user value, you could consolidate them altogether with 301s. I always hesitate to suggest it without in-depth knowledge of the site, though, because I've seen people run off and do something dangerous.
-
What's the purpose of the URL if there's not even any sorting or anything unique going on? If's a sorted URL (say by "size" smallest-largest for /little leage/ URL) it might be actually useful to develop some unique category content to let the page rank separately.
If the content is totally unique, I don't think you could really go wrong redirecting. To be safe, I'd probably rely on analytics to answer the question "what impact will redirection have?" For instance, is there a difference in conversion rate between the URLs. If you see a conversion bump from a more specific URL, you might want to sleuth out what's causing it.
-
Would you worry about it if the categories are somewhat useful for users to drill down the content?
For example:
/product.html
/aluminum-baseball-bats/product.html
/little-league-baseball-bats/product.htmlThey don't sell bats but it is the easiest way to describe it I guess. In this cause would you still 301 redirect the two longer urls to /product.html
-
Yes, providing that the /category1/ and /category2/ heirarchy doesn't help the user experience (e.g. product segmentation based on say, color and brand, which would be useful for users to drill down to).
I like 301s better because they are permanent, non-ambiguous, respected by all engines, and chiefly because they eliminate the possibilty of inlink dillution because the redirected URLs are never seeen.
-
Yeah, don't use rel=canonical for the same purpose as rel=alternate - the canonical tag will override the alternate/lang tag and may cause your alternate versions to rank incorrectly or not at all. It can be a bit unpredictable. If you only wanted one version to show up in search results, then rel=canonical would be ok, but rel=alternate is a softer signal to help Google rank the right page in the right situation. It's not perfect, but that's the intent.
As for multiple canonicals like what you described, that's essential like chaining 301-redirects. As much as possible, avoid it - you'll lose link equity, and Google may just not honor them in some cases. There's no hard/fast limit, and two levels may be ok in some cases, but I think it's just a recipe for trouble long-term. Fix the canonicals to be single-hop wherever possible.
-
Thanks that is what I was thinking, I just need to know more about if the bots will follow the canonical's past one level when pointing to a different domain and if so how many levels on the different sites.
-
Interesting idea, I might have to do that. Right now I have canonical elements on the .com
It is a magento store so it creates dirty duplicate content when the products are in different categories out of the box, for example magento creates the following product pages:
domain.com/store/productcategory1/product.html
domain.com/store/productcategory2/product.html
domain.com/store/product.htmlIn this case I have canonical elements pointing the categories to the main root domain.com/store/product.html
So you think it would be better to do a 301 redirect for the different product urls that are in subcategories?
-
Miles,
On your last question, I'm wondering if those two canonical tags are necessary? Are the /sub/ versions of those pages necessary for user experience? If not, I'd add a canonical element to the .com version, then redirect the /sub/product.html to /product.html. That would help you avoid splitting link authority.
-
Hey Miles,
The both are for different uses and may or may not be used in the same page depending on your situation.
If the content in the CA and COM versions is the same, then you should add a rel canonical + rel alternate, the rel alternate pointing to itself and the other version of it, and the canonical pointing to the one you consider definitive.
If the content isn't the same, then the rel canonical isn't needed (but suggested, pointing to itself in each lang/alternate), only the alternate should be in place.
You can read more on Dr. Pete's post here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Hope that 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
-
Call for Help. Hit Badly with "Medic" and another 30% Loss with Sept 28th Update
Hi Everyone, I am not sure how this is all happening. We have been online for about 15 years, and now we are at our lowest amount of traffic in about 10 years. Our sites are www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com. We sell commodity items, but I have focused on unique product descriptions, tons of UGC, blog posts and guides for awhile now and it has always done us well. Until as of late. This is what I feel led up to this, but I am hoping there is something I missed. May 1st, 2018: Migrated www.bestpricenutrition.com and www.mysupplementstore.com from Shopify. Similar sites, but almost all unique content. We purchased www.mysupplementstore.com about 8 years ago. A ton of traffic and sales, which is why we didn't just redirect it. Around May 25th: www.mysupplementstore.com took a big hit and lost almost 40% of its traffic. Nothing happened to www.bestpricenutrition.com, we actually increased traffic. Aug 1st Update: www.mysupplementstore.com lost another 25% of its traffic. www.bestpricenutrition.com lost about 40% of it's traffic. Sept 28th: Nothing happened to www.mysupplementstore.com, but www.bestpricenutrition.com lost another 30% of it's traffic. So I have been trying to figure out if there is anything technically wrong, but doesn't seem so. These are issues we discovered in August. During the migration, the reviews from each site were syndicated to both websites. There were 1000's. This was resolved in mid August. During the migration, the company doing the migration pushed our blog posts to both websites. 100's of blog posts duplicated to each website. This was resolved mid August. We found that a disgruntled employee instead writing unique content for our product pages, she was copying them one from another. This was about 100 product pages, which we have since resolved. What's Left I noticed on www.bestpricenutrition.com that we have 100's of blog posts that are getting hardly any traffic. I had trimmed www.mysupplementstore.com of this low traffic content. I am working on www.bestpricenutrition.com still. I have been in this industry since 2003, survived 2012, but have exhausted everything I know to figure this out. It's another sob story I know, but trying to keep everyone's job alive here, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Something happened within the last 2 weeks on our WordPress-hosted site that created "duplicates" by counting www.company.com/example and company.com/example (without the 'www.') as separate pages. Any idea what could have happened, and how to fix it?
Our website is running through WordPress. We've been running Moz for over a month now. Only recently, within the past 2 weeks, have we been alerted to over 100 duplicate pages. It appears something happened that created a duplicate of every single page on our site; "www.company.com/example" and "company.com/example." Again, according to our MOZ, this is a recent issue. I'm almost certain that prior to a couple of weeks ago, there existed both forms of the URL that directed to the same page without be counting as a duplicate. Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wzimmer0 -
Best Way To Go About Fixing "HTML Improvements"
So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles. I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week. (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz0 -
Ranking of Moz "A" grade page.
Hello, I built a site in Weebly recently and it was indexed by Google and the one page in fact ranked #1 for one keyword. I used absolutely no SEO optimization techniques for this. It then rapidly dropped out of sight (not surprising ). I have now optimized the site in general and specifically the page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process as recommended by Moz. All the optimization was on-page, except that I also used the SEOProfiler tool to submit the site to their list of search engines recommended and I manually linked to a number of reputable directories. I did this on 09/03. If I search for www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process I can see the page has been cached on 10/3. However,if I search for any of my 3 search terms for example "voluntary sequestration" and then do an advanced search for "insolvencylifeline", I only get search results for pages cached before 9/3. My page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process which I know is fully optimized (“A” Moz grade) for the search term, does not rank at all. Also if I search for www.insolvencylifeline.co.za, I can see that the page also was cached on 10/3. However, it does not show www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process at all and the other pages shown were all cached before 9/3. Does this mean that the page www.insolvencylifeline.co.za/voluntary-sequestration-process does not rank at all even though it is indexed? If so, any thoughts on why? Regards, Gerhard.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gerrhard0 -
"No index" page still shows in search results and paginated pages shows page 2 in results
I have "no index, follow" on some pages, which I set 2 weeks ago. Today I see one of these pages showing in Google Search Results. I am using rel=next prev on pages, yet Page 2 of a string of pages showed up in results before Page 1. What could be the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Brackets vs Encoded URLs: The "Same" in Google's eyes, or dup content?
Hello, This is the first time I've asked a question here, but I would really appreciate the advice of the community - thank you, thank you! Scenario: Internal linking is pointing to two different versions of a URL, one with brackets [] and the other version with the brackets encoded as %5B%5D Version 1: http://www.site.com/test?hello**[]=all&howdy[]=all&ciao[]=all
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile
Version 2: http://www.site.com/test?hello%5B%5D**=all&howdy**%5B%5D**=all&ciao**%5B%5D**=all Question: Will search engines view these as duplicate content? Technically there is a difference in characters, but it's only because one version encodes the brackets, and the other does not (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp) We are asking the developer to encode ALL URLs because this seems cleaner but they are telling us that Google will see zero difference. We aren't sure if this is true, since engines can get so _hung up on even one single difference in character. _ We don't want to unnecessarily fracture the internal link structure of the site, so again - any feedback is welcome, thank you. 🙂0 -
Rel=canonical an iframed version of the same website?
My issue is that we have two websites with the same content. For the sake of an example lets say they are: jackson.com jacksonboats.com When you go to jacksonboats.com, the website is an iframed version of jackson.com. However all of the companies email addresses are example@jacksonboats.com so a 301 is not possible. What would be the best way to forward over the link juice from jacksonboats.com to jackson.com? I'm thinking a rel=canonical tag, but I wanted to ask first. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenGMKT0 -
Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update). I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken". The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty. I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed. Could this have been what caused the error? (If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0