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
-
High or low volume keyword
Does it take longer to rank on high volume versus a low volume keyword ? if so why Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Href lang and multilingual question
Greetings Moz-Hive mind! I'm hoping you can help me on the internationalisation conundrum below; We currently have a website with three distinct 'locales' US, SEA and UK we automatically redirect customers using IP recognition to a locale which matches, we also determine their currency based on IP. The issue we currently have is a lot of duplicate content and no use of href lang or rel=canonical tags etc... My proposed structure would be to create a locale based directory for the three locales we offer. / - being US and most other Worldwide /uk - being UK /as - being Hong Kong and other Asian territories. How would you suggest we set up the href lang tags for these? Because technically there are going to be multiple language possibilities within. Our main customers are English only if this helps. Also as a secondary question, how should I set up the Google Search Console settings for each of these directories? Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashley-Jacada0 -
Canonical URL availability
Hi We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL. For instance: Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL: But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner0 -
XML sitemaps questions
Hi All, My developer has asked me some questions that I do not know the answer to. We have both searched for an answer but can't find one.... So, I was hoping that the clever folk on Moz can help!!! Here is couple questions that would be nice to clarify on. What is the actual address/name of file for news xml. Can xml site maps be generated on request? Consider following scenario: spider requests http://mypage.com/sitemap.xml which permanently redirects to extensionless MVC 4 page http://mypage.com/sitemapxml/ . This page generates xml. Thank you, Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Duplicate Content Question
We are getting ready to release an integration with another product for our app. We would like to add a landing page specifically for this integration. We would also like it to be very similar to our current home page. However, if we do this and use a lot of the same content, will this hurt our SEO due to duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NathanGilmore0 -
A question of rankings (with actual domains)
Working with the main site featured in this Open Site Explorer comparison (you'll need a pro account to view this), and have been for quite some time. Recently we've slid behind Ebay (huge brand, I get it), but the other competitors don't really make sense to me. Main phrase is pontoon boats, and maybe I'm too close to this, but we seem to be in the best shape overall in terms of the domain, the page itself, and even our social media is pretty successful (we're closing in on 5,000 likes and have a pretty engaged audience). More internal linking is an opportunity, but I'd like another set of eyes (or several for that matter) to weigh in on opinions. I'm a bit stumped. Thanks Mozzers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetvantageMarketing0 -
Should I be using rel canonical here?
I am reorganizing the data on my informational site in a drilldown menu. So, here's an example. One the home page are several different items. Let's say you clicked on "Back Problems". Then, you would get a menu that says: Disc problems, Pain relief, paralysis issues, see all back articles. Each of those pages will have a list of articles that suit. Some articles will appear on more than one page. Should I be worried about these pages being partially duplicates of each other? Should I use rel-canonical to make the root page for each section the one that is indexed. I'm thinking no, because I think it would be good to have all of these pages indexed. But then, that's why I'm asking!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0