Canonicalisation query
-
Hi,
I'm in a bit of a quandary.
I have this page: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/
As you can see we have provided filters to only display Fixed rate, Tracker rate, Variable rate, High LTV and HMO products for users.
At the moment our canonical tags all point to the main Comparison page, but in order for the search feature to work dynamic urls are created. So for example on the fixed rate page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/) when a user puts in their search criteria the url ends up looking like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/?PrevTab=HMO&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=20&SearchId=5508
Now, my quandary is this - should I make the canonical tag for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc) like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/ or should I keep it at https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/ ? The comparison page shows all products, ordered by the lowest rate and with a pre-set search, limited to 20 - so not all products will be displayed on the page - and some products (like the high LTV ones) are not displayed on the main comparison landing page anyway...
Thanks,
Amelia
-
I have canonicalised the filtered products, and have put a request in to make the H1s editable so will alter those as soon as I can.
Thank you all for taking the time to answer this question, I appreciate it greatly.
Best wishes,
Amelia
-
Thank you!
-
IMO, your canonical tag should be for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc).
individually all pages have different products. It's like a blog. Blogs main page has links all top 10 or 20 or all the blog posts but they have independent pages as well. So you should not be worried about plagiarism issue here.
With this change you'll get a boost in ranking for other two three more products (fixed, tracker etc) as well. as they'll have their own dedicated pages.
canonicalizing all the products to single page is not a good idea
-
Thank you Patrick. I think I agree with you, but I'll wait for other responses as well! It's been like this for over a month so a few more days won't harm it
Best wishes,
Amelia
-
Thank you - yes people do use very specific queries to find mortgages. We have landing pages for the higher volume keywords (I won't bore you with the list!!!).
I don't want to rank for 'Mortgage Comparison' as we don't offer residential mortgages - just those for business purposes (such as BTL) so although we'd get a huge amount of traffic our bounce rate would go through the roof - or we'd get enquiries we couldn't deal with which would be a waste of resource...
I appreciate your point about the H1s - and I'll get these updated as soon as I can (I think our devs need to do some stuff to the page to allow me to edit it myself) - Thank you!
Thanks again,
Amelia
-
Hi Amelia
As all of these pages...
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/variable-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/high-ltv/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/hmo-rates/...are their own pages. If it were me, I would canonicalize these to themselves, not solely the compare-products page. Reason being, these are different tables, different pieces of data, different purpose pages that probably have equity of their own in search that you could potentially be missing out on.
I'd be interested to hear other opinions on this as well. That's my two cents just quickly looking at this. Hope this helps - let me know if you have any other questions!
-
Hi Amelia,
Don't know the mortgage business well, but I imagine that people are looking for keywords like "best fixed rate mortgage" or "10 year fixed rate mortgage" etc.
For these queries, the canonical url you use doesn't make much sense. I would try to have url's that correspond to each of these queries - this could be done by rewriting the url's - or by using parameters.
In your case the url
could have this canonical:
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/?Tme=5
(in case you decide to keep the parameters - it's probably better to replace 'tme' by 'duration' - see also link below)
or
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/5-years
(of course, you must make sure that these canonical pages exist)To be very honest, I think the "/compare-products/" in the url doesn't add much value - I would rather replace it by /mortgage-comparison/ or /buy-to-let-mortgage-comparison/
I would also update the H1 for each of these url's - currently it's a bit generic (Compare buy to let mortgages) - for the example above I would change it to something like : "Mortgage comparison: Best tracker rates - 5 years" (according to Semrush 'mortgage comparison' is more popular as search term than 'compare mortgage'
There is a interesting post of webmastercentral on facetted navigation which would be worth reading: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html
Hope this helps
Dirk
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
-
Brand queries as a ranking signal?
Hi folks, I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this. I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this? Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this... I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this. Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would? Best wishes, Amelia PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me 😉
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Long urls created by filters (not with query parameters)
A website adds subfolders to a category URL for each filter that's selected. In a crawl of the website some of these URLs reach over 400 characters. For example, if I select shoe size 5, 5.5 and 6, white and blue colour, price $70-$100, heel and platform styles, the URL will be as follows: www.example.com/shoes/womens/filters/shoe-size--5--5.5--6/color--white--blue/price--70-100/style--heel--platform There is a canonical that points to www.example.com/shoes/womens/ so it isn't a duplicate content issue. But these URLs still get crawled. How would you handle this? It's not a great system so I'm tempted to tell them to start over with best practice recommendations, but maybe I should just tell them to block the "/filters/" folder from crawlers? For some products however, filtered content would be worth having in search indexes (e.g. colour).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
My website has disapeared from all google queries except the ones that contains it´s own website name
Hi, My website URL is: www.nixiweb.com Before June of 2013 my website was always shown at first or second place at google when searching for "hosting gratis". After June of 2013 my website has disappeared from all searches, it only appears when I search for the site name, eg: "nixiweb" or “www.nixiweb.com” At webmaster tools, the search queries table only shows queries related to my website name (eg: "nixiweb" or “xixiweb”), and none related to any other keyword. Can anybody help me understanding which is the problem with my site? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nixiweb0 -
Why did I fall off the SERP for my url query? Im i being penalized?
The website is privateequityfirms.com, We would rank as high as 4th behind wikipedia from the query "private equity firms" but recently dropped to 77th for no reason. All my other keywords seem to no affected? whats going on, Im i being penalized? I attached GWT search query info Thanks, PEFDrop_zpsd4002b86.png MozAnalyticsDROP_zps9401bf4b.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nicktaylor10 -
How Does Google Treat Date Ranges For a Specific Keyword or Query?
How are date ranges interpreted by Google - ie if you type "1993-2003" does Google know 1995 is incl. and should be referenced for a query? What is the best practice for an ecomm site when it comes to a landing page for multiple years? Should be list out each year (looks spammy, "2003,2004,2005...), go with a full range (1993-2003 ), or is a two digit range suffice (88-95)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Title displays differently depending on search query?
Hi, I have seen this a few times but maybe someone can shed some light as to why this happens? If I search for a generic keyword im targeting in the title tag it shows the actual title tag placed in the code. But if I search for the brand name, the title tag changes to show just the brand name, so completely different to the default title tag. Any ideas why it does this? And is this bad, is Google saying the content on the site is not relevant and therefore decides to change it? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Amount of pages indexed for classified (number of pages for the same query)
I've notice that classified usually has a lots of pages indexed and that's because for each query/kw they index the first 100 results pages, normally they have 10 results per page. As an example imagine the site www.classified.com, for the query/kw "house for rent new york" there is the page www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york and the "index" is set for the first 100 SERP pages, so www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-1 www.classified.com/houses/house-for-rent-new-york-2 ...and so on. Wouldn't it better to index only the 1st result page? I mean in the first 100 pages lots of ads are very similar so why should Google be happy by indexing lots of similar pages? Could Google penalyze this behaviour? What's your suggestions? Many tahnks in advance for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuroa-2467120 -
Subdomain canonicalisation
Hi Moz fans, I had a telephone conversation with an SEO company last week and they mentioned that the following "versions" of my domain were causing a canonicalisation issue; http://www.example.com www.example.com example.com I've already fixed the /index.html issue but do the above 3 also need to be fixed? Is the best solution to use a 301 redirect? As a side note, the SEOmoz web app doesn't identify these as being duplicate content... Regards, Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshSEO20110