High level rel=canonical conceptual question
-
Hi community. Your advice and perspective is greatly appreciated.
We are doing a site replatform and I fear that serious SEO fundamentals were overlooked and I am not getting straight answers to a simple question: How are we communicating to search engines the single URL we want indexed?
Backstory: Current site has major duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical is not used. There are currently 2 versions of every category and product detail page. Both are indexed in certain instances. A 60 page audit has recommends rel=canonical at least 10 times for the similar situations an ecommerce site has with dupe urls/content.
New site: We are rolling out 2 URLS AGAIN!!! URL A is an internal URL generated by the systerm. We have developed this fancy dynamic sitemap generator which looks/maps to URL A and creates a SEO optimized URL that I call URL B. URL B is then inserted into the site map and the sitemap is communicated externally to google. URL B does an internal 301 redirect back to URL A...so in an essence, the URL a customer sees is not the same as what we want google to see.
I still think there is potential for duplicate indexing. What do you think?
Is rel=canonical the answer?
In my research on this site, past projects and google I think the correct solution is this on each customer facing category and pdp:
The head section (With the optimized Meta Title and Meta Description) needs to have the rel-canonical pointing to URL B
example of the meta area of URL A:What do you think? I am open to all ideas and I can provide more details if needed.
-
Yes, if you redirect URL B, it will not be indexed as content. It will be ignored by Google.
Well... Not ignored, but Google will acknowledge the URL B shouldn't be indexed.
-
Hi guys. I have researched and discussed further.
According to your thoughts, the rel=canonical and 301 redirect in the description in the original post will conflict with each other.
In all honestly, I stated that rel=canonical is being used (I am fighting for it) but it is not in the future state plan.
I will restate a similar situation (with what I think the same outcome is). If we 301 redirect URL B (optimized in sitemap) back to URL A (system generated) without rel=canonical then ultimately we are saying "don't index URL b"???
-
I will verify the fine details of the internal 301 redirect. The entire process as described to me seems a bit fishy also. The developers keep saying "the site map is the only thing that will be indexed" which we know is false.
Ultimately the real solution was getting URL A to be the most optimized.
Thanks, and more to com
-
HI,
I think you are going to have problems as you describe it (if I understood it correctly). 301s and canonicals are not the same thing, the 301 is actually taking you to the second page, the canonical is suggesting which page you want to be considered the main page to index. In your case you are declaring pageB in the sitemp, 301ing that to pageA and then recommending pageB be considered the main page (which is 301ing back to pageA again). The results of that is difficult to predict to say the least. I would think the most likely result is your pageA results being indexed, but only after making life difficult for googlebot et al by running them through this loop.
Is there no chance of fixing the cms so that the pageB urls can be displayed properly without a 301?
-
I don't understand the purpose of the 301 redirect. If you are redirecting your fancy URL, that is "SEO optimized"-- then you are doing nothing. The only thing that will be indexed will be the non-fancy URL. If you 301 redirect anything, that page will not be indexed, so making a keyword-rich URL is useless. Instead, I would use only canonical tags.
So, for example, let's say you have a product page. And it's at example.com/product-name/
But it's also in other places example.com/tags/vases/product-name/
General accepted SEO practices would say that all of the additional or supplemental pages should have the rel=canonical point to the "original." (Not redirected back to the original.)
However, because Google seems to be favoring breadcrumbs more than ever-- you might want to pick a page with breadcrumbs (Page B) and make that page the canonical. You could try it both ways with different products and see how it goes.
Now, please bear in mind that I just thought of this as I was answering your question, and this is just something to think about- I haven't actually tried this, but I might...
In other words, if I had:
example.com/400-watt-halide-bulb/
but I also had it in:
example.com/light-bulbs/halide/400-watt-halide-bulb/
I might point all examples of that product to the longer, breadcrumbed URL with the canonical link. But again, just thinking out loud.
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
-
Is this the correct way of using rel canonical, next and prev for paginated content?
Hello Moz fellows, a while ago (3-4 years ago) we setup our e-commerce website category pages to apply what Google suggested to correctly handle pagination. We added rel "canonicals", rel "next" and "prev" as follows: On page 1: On page 2: On page 3: And so on, until the last page is reached: Do you think everything we have been doing is correct? I have doubts on the way we have handled the canonical tag, so, any help to confirm that is very appreciated! Thank you in advance to everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Why is rel="canonical" pointing at a URL with parameters bad?
Context Our website has a large number of crawl issues stemming from duplicate page content (source: Moz). According to an SEO firm which recently audited our website, some amount of these crawl issues are due to URL parameter usage. They have recommended that we "make sure every page has a Rel Canonical tag that points to the non-parameter version of that URL…parameters should never appear in Canonical tags." Here's an example URL where we have parameters in our canonical tag... http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/ rel="canonical" href="http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/?pageSize=0&pageSizeBottom=0" /> Our website runs on IBM WebSphere v 7. Questions Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL? What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters? Any advice for correcting this? Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Solid_Gold1 -
Technical Site Questions
When i do a google cache of our site, i see 2 menus, our developers say that's because the 2nd is for the mobile menu - is that correct, as when i look up other sites that have mobile rendering they only have one menu visible. Plus GWT's has the number of internal links per page at least x2 what they should have - are they connected? Secondly when i do a spider test through http://tools.seobook.com/general/spider-test/ it shows all "behind the scenes text" eg font names, portals, sliders, margins - "font size px" is shown as 17 times and a density of 2.15% - surely this isnt correct as google will be thinking that these are my keywords !? My site is www.over50choices.co.uk Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Canonical tags and product descriptions
I just wanted to check what you guys thought of this strategy for duplicate product descriptions. A sample product is a letter bracelet - a, b, c etc so there are 26 products with identical descriptions. It is going to be extremely difficult to come up with 25 new unique descriptions so with recommendation i'm looking to use the canonical tag. I can't set any to no-index because visitors will look for explicit letters. Because the titles only differ by the letter then a search for either letter bracelet letter a bracelet letter i bracelet will just return results for 'letter bracelet' due to stop words unless the searcher explicitly searches for 'letter "a" bracelet. So I reckon I can make 4 new unique descriptions. I research what are the most popular letters picking 5 from the top (excluding 'a' and 'i'). Equally share the remaining letters between those 5 and with each group set a canonical tag pointing to the primary letter of that group. Does this seem a sensible thing to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Duplicate Content Question
Brief question - SEOMOZ is teling me that i have duplicate content on the following two pages http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/ and http://www.passportsandvisas.com/visas/index.asp The default page for the /visas/ directory is index.asp - so it effectively the same page - but apparently SEOMOZ and more importantly Google, etc treat these as two different pages. I read about 301 redirects etc, but in this case there aren't two physical HTML pages - so how do I fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | santiago230 -
Anchor text questions - What are your thoughts?
Hi, I want to talk about anchor text and the effect it has on search engines (Good & Bad). Here is a fictitious example we can talk about: www.supercoolrunningsneakers.com Title Tag: Running Sneakers - The Super Trendy Running Trainers Keywords targeted: Running Sneakers, Running Trainers How would you vary your anchor text to target these terms? If you had 50 unique articles to play with how would you vary the anchor text using the articles? Would you push 25 articles at 'Running Sneakers' and the other 25 at 'Running Trainers' or would you link some articles using the domain name anchor text? Q: I'm guessing running 50 articles using anchor text 'Running Sneakers' would benefit the SERP's moe for that term then mixing it up with say 'Running Sneakers', 'Running Trainers' & 'Domain Name Links'. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Rel Alternate tag and canonical tag implementation question
Hello, I have a question about the correct way to implement the canoncial and alternate tags for a site supporting multiple languages and markets. Here's our setup. We have 3 sites, each serving a specific region, and each available in 3 languages. www.example.com : serves the US, default language is English www.example.ca : serves Canada, default language is English www.example.com.mx : serves Mexico, default language is Spanish In addition, each sites can be viewed in English, French or Spanish, by adding a language specific sub-directory prefix ( /fr , /en, /es). The implementation of the alternate tag is fairly straightforward. For the homepage, on www.example.com, it would be: -MX” href=“http://www.example.com.mx/index.html” /> -MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/fr/index.html“ />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amiee
-MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/en/index.html“ />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/fr/index.html” />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/es/index.html“ />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/fr/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/es/index.html” /> My question is about the implementation of the canonical tag. Currently, each domain has its own canonical tag, as follows: rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/index.html"> <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.ca="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
<link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com.mx="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> I am now wondering is I should set the canonical tag for all my domains to: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> This is what seems to be suggested on this example from the Google help center. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 What do you think?0