Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
-
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links.
Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag.
-
However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up?
-
I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up...
Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
-
-
What I do when I want to get an idea of how frequently Google crawls a page is I look at when it was last crawled. If the cached date was a long time ago, Google probably doesn't crawl it that often. If it was recently cached, it could mean a more frequent crawl—but it also might be that I just caught it at the right time. So I look at a few similar pages to see if they agree.
(To see when a page was cached, do a search on the URL of the page in question—just put the URL right in the search box. In the results, look next to the green URL in the result which is the page you searched for and there is a little green triangle. Click that, and you will see "cached." Choose that, and it will bring up the version of the page that Google has cached, along with the date it was cached.)
Don't worry too much. Even without your fixes, Google will figure out the situation on its own and start showing a preferred URL anyway. But yes, it is generally a good choice to show yourself in the best light and follow best practices to make things as easy as possible for Google.
-
There is no specific, hard set, predefined "time" between crawls that applies to all sites.
It varies, from site to site.
It varies from page to page.
It is based on Popularity.
If your page/site is not popular - then it will take longer till it is crawled again.
-
Thanks for a response.
What's a 'normal' wait time -- 2 days? 7 days? 14 days? How do I know when to try again?
-
If you've changed your canonical tag, but Google hasn't updated its index, there's nothing more you can do till you see what effect it has. Wait a few days and post again with your results. If something's out of order, at least we have another data set to compare it to.
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 it helpful for seo to have helpful links at the footer?
HI, suppose my homepage has good content but no external links to other sites for more info. and no helpful internal links in the footer to learn more. and my competition has 9 internal links in the footer which links to other pages on the site who has more SEO boost? I know the answer , does it really makes a difference or its minute?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL1 -
Duplicate pages and Canonicals
Hi all, Our website has more than 30 pages which are duplicates. So canonicals have been deployed to show up only 10 of these pages. Do more of these pages impact rankings? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Help with 404 pages
Hello everyone, A few days back, we have permanently removed 3 main categories from our E-commerce website and because of that our more than 50k URLs are showing 404 error (according to Google Search Console). What are the good practices to handle such extensively 404 pages? Please help!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Canonical Tag help
Hello everyone, We have implemented canonical tag on our website: http://www.indialetsplay.com/ For e.g. on http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=42 we added canonical as http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=all (as it showcase all products) Our default page is http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers Is canonical tag implementation right? Or we need to add any other URL. Please suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Appropriate use of rel canonical
Hey Guys,I'm a bit stuck. My on-page grade indicated the following two issues and I need to find how how to fix both issues.If you have a solution, could you please let me know how to address these issues? It's all a bit intimidating at the moment!!Thank you so much..****************************************************************************************************************************************Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical 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. Recommendation: 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. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag. Recommendation: Remove all but a single canonical URL tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StoryScout1 -
Rel Canonical Link on the Canonical Page
Is there a problem with placing a rel=canonical link on the canonical page - in addition to the duplicate pages? For example, would that create create an endless loop where the canonical page keeps referring to itself? Two examples that are troubling me are: My home site is www.1099pro.com which is exactly the same as www.1099pro.com/index.asp (all updates to the home page are made by updating the index.asp page). I want www.1099pro.com/index.asp to have the rel=canonical link to point to my standard homepage www.1099pro.com but any update that I make on the index page is automatically incorporated into www.1099pro.com as well. I don't have access to my hosting web server and any updates I make have to be done to the specific landing pages/templates. I am also creating a new website that could possible have pages with duplicate content in the future. I would like to already include the rel=canonical link on the standard canonical page even though there is not duplicate content yet. Any help really would be appreciated. I've read a ton of articles on the subject but none really define whether or not it is ok to have the rel=canonical link on both the canonical page and the duplicate pages. The closest explanation was in a MOZ article that it was ok but the answer was fuzzy. -Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
My site falls more than 50 in two days, help me!
My site appeared in the top 10 for that link (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html) and not by this (http://www.vipgoldrj.com), was well at 2 months, and he suddenly disappeared, I wanted to know if he had been penalized and Google told me it was not. What should I do? The. Sorry my English, I am Brazilian and I'm using Google translator. Warning from SEOmoz staff: this is an escort site with full frontal nudity and is not safe for most workplaces.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebMaster0210 -
Seeking Help with Domain Acquisition Redirect Strategy
My company is purchasing www.boughtsite.com. This new site has multiple sub-domain sites: customsite1.boughtsite.com, customsite2.boughtsite.com, etc. 1. Is it possible to redirect everything from www.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com while leaving the other sub-domain sites active? These other sites have different audiences than our main site. 2. Would it be an okay solution to just place a link on boughtsite.com to mycompanysite.com telling visitors "We have been re-branded to My Company" 3. Can I use an i-frame to move customsite1.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com/customsite1 instead? Thanks for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0