Canonical Expert question!
-
Hello,
I am looking for some help here with an estate agent property web site. I recently finished the MoZ crawling report and noticed that MoZ sees some pages as duplicate, mainly from pages which list properties as page 1,2,3 etc. Here is an example:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=3 etc etcNow I know that the best practise says I should set a canonical url to this page:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=allbut here is where my problem is.
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 contains good written content (around 750 words) before the listed properties are displayed while the "page=all" page do not have that content, only the properties listed.
Also http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 is similar with the originally designed landing page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses
I would like yoru advise as to what is the best way to can url this and sort the problem. My original thoughts were to can=url to this page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses instead of the "page=all" version but your opinion will be highly appreciated.
-
Do "/houses" and "/houses?page=1" have exactly the same content? I'd definitely want to see rel=canonical on the "page=1" version - those are just duplicates. Google has expressly said that they don't want you to canonical pages 2, 3, etc. back to page 1. That doesn't mean it never works, just that it's a bit dicey.
As Chris said, rel=prev/next is another option. Theoretically, it would allow all of the results pages to rank, but let Google know they're a series and not count them against you as thin content. In practice, even my enterprise SEO colleagues have mixed feelings. There's just very limited evidence regarding how effective it is. It is low-risk.
The other option is to go a bit more old-school and META NOINDEX anything with "page=", and just let the original version get indexed and rank. This can help prevent any dilution and would also solve your "page=1" issue. The biggest risk here is if that cut off PR flow across your site or if you had links to the paginated results. In most cases, that's unlikely (people don't link to or tweet page 17 of your search results), but it's a case-by-case thing.
Unfortunately, the "best" solution can be very situational, and even Google isn't very clear about it.
-
It would work but the content after that e.g http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2 would but lost as they would not be indexed. so if there is content on those pages you feel is valuable might want to look int alternatives however is the strongest content is on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses you will be fine to set that as the tag location.
-
i have but i was hoping to know if this is solved by adding rel=canonical to the original content landing page? http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses
all page have same content but the text content for some reason appears only on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses page and on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 page
-
Have you considered the paginated tag ? you could also have a page with a view all option and canonical to that and thus get all the content listed. Why wouldn't the view all page have the same content as each page ?
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
-
General SSL Questions After Move
Hello, We have moved our site to https, Google Analytics seems to be tracking correctly. However, I have seen some conflicting information, should I create a new view in analytics? Additionally, should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property? Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Finally, after doing a crawl on our http domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? Thanks for all the help in advance, I know there are a lot of questions here.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Page Speed/Website Optimization Question
We recently relaunched our website and after running multiple page speed tests (GT Metrix, Google, etc.) our results aren't great. We would love any suggestions on how to improve our site as we are not experts in what exactly these results mean - https://gtmetrix.com/reports/loyalty360.org/DKRN0hKg. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Bing rankings question
Hi, We just wrapped up a website redesign about a month ago. The content stayed primarily the same. Once we launched the new site all of our rankings in Google stayed the same but we lost rank for all competitive keywords on Bing. I looked in Bing Webmaster tools and it doesn't show any penalties but it does show that we have too many H1 tags. I don't think the H1 tag thing is the issue but maybe. Do you know what could be causing this?
Technical SEO | | BT20090 -
Website Hierarchy Question / Discussion
Hey all, I am looking to get the opinions off the community to help settle a discussion / debate. We are looking at how a site is laid out and which is the preferred method. There are two options: www.site.com --> /category-page --> /product-page (With this option, you always have the domain name and then page, no matter where in the site you actually are, and how many clicks it took you to get there). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/product-page www.site.com --> /category-page --> /category-page/product-page --> (With this option, you into a defined structure). Your URL to the end page here would be www.site.com/category-page/product-page If you have a moment, I would be interested to know your views on which you would consider to be your preferred method and why. Thanks, Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy.Drinkwater0 -
Screaming From occurences and canonicals what does it all mean
Bonjourno from Wetherby UK... Ive used a package called screamong frog to diagnose canonical errors but can anyone tell me what this means? http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/understand-occurances-canonical.jpg Thanks in advance. David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Robots.txt questions...
All, My site is rather complicated, but I will try to break down my question as simply as possible. I have a robots.txt document in the root level of my site to disallow robot access to /_system/, my CMS. This looks like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
Technical SEO | | Horizon
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/ I have another robots.txt file in another level down, which is my holiday database - www.mysite.com/holiday-database/ - this is to disallow access to /holiday-database/ControlPanel/, my database CMS. This looks like this: **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Am I correct in thinking that this file must also be in the root level, and not in the /holiday-database/ level? If so, should my new robots.txt file look like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /holiday-database/ControlPanel/ Or, like this: # /robots.txt file for http://webcrawler.com/
# mail webmaster@webcrawler.com for constructive criticism **User-agent: ***
Disallow: /_system/
Disallow: /ControlPanel/ Thanks in advance. Matt0 -
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
When using the On page report card I get a critical error on Rel Canonical Im not sure if I have understood this right but I think that my problem is that I own a Norwegian Domain name which is www.danske-båten.no This domain works great in norwegian, but I get problems with english (foreign) browsers. My english domain name is http://www.danske-båten.no. When you buy a domain name with the letter Å you get a non norwegian domain name as well. (dont quite get the tecnical aspect of it) Så when I publish a page (using wordpress if that means anything) I get this message: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.danske-båten.no/ferge-oslo-københavn/"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So What to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | stlastla
</dd> </dl>0 -
Canonical on ecommerce site
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0