Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
-
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
-
I would just title them according to their view type. Try to put your most informative words as close to the front as possible so that it's easy to read in browser tabs, for example: Red Widgets, All Widgets, <$25 Widgets... etc. Meta description could probably be a repeat of the title tag. Make the title as UX friendly as possible.
-
- What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
Yes, I would not put them in the sitemap. Main goal of a sitemap is to make it easier for bots to discover the different pages of the site. The pages that have a canonical url pointing to another page don't really need this, as you don't want the search engines to index them anyway.
-
Since my preference is always to have people land on the page with thumbnails that is what I was thinking but wanted to double check. Thank you.
-
Based on how you're describing it, I'd leave them out of the sitemap.
-
These pages will be almost identical. They are category pages for ecommerce and the only difference is it will display all items and there will be no thumbnails. It sounds like you are saying not to put them in the sitemap in this instance?
-
They are category pages for an ecommerce site. Currently we list the items 25 to a page with a thumbnail. The second view will be all of the items in a basic list view with no thumbnails. We have some categories with several hundred items and our users have requested a way to see them all on one page.
-
Hi,
Agree with the arguments of Ryan on the whether or not to put the canonical.
However, if you decide that these pages are almost identical, and that you will use a canonical, it has no use to put all the variations of these pages in the sitemap. However, you should add the canonical version to the sitemap.
It's not a big problem if these pages are in the sitemap, you'll just notice it webmaster tools a low % of indexed pages for this sitemap.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Are the different views going to be substantially different pages or a reordering of products seen throughout each view? If the latter is the case I wouldn't use rel="canonical" for each view. If the pages are substantially different, like one is just displaying widgets, while the other is displaying widget maintenance tools, the having each of those pages as categorical sections to your store is worth it and worth being in the sitemap.
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
-
Adding a Canonical Tag to each page referencing itself?
Hey Mozers! I've noticed that on www.Zappos.com they have a Canonical tag on each page referencing it self. I have heard that this is a popular method but I dont see the point in canon tagging a page to its self. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Is it better "nofollow" or "follow" links to external social pages?
Hello, I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+). if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do? Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that. Any suggestions are very welcome. Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau9 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Canonical VS Rel=Next & Rel=Prev for Paginated Pages
I run an ecommerce site that paginates product pages within Categories/Sub-Categories. Currently, products are not displayed in multiple categories but this will most likely happen as time goes on (in Clearance and Manufacturer Categories). I am unclear as to the proper implementation of Canonical tags and Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages. I do not have a View All page to use as the Canonical URL so that is not an option. I want to avoid duplicate content issues down the road when products are displayed in multiple categories of the site and have Search Engines index paginated pages. My question is, should I use the Rel=Next & Rel=Prev tags on paginated pages as well as using Page One as the Canonical URL? Also, should I implement the Canonical tag on pages that are not yet paginated (only one page)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mj7750 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0
