Canonical Query
-
If Google decides to ignore your canonical and indexes numerous versions, does that count as duplicate content?
We've got a large amount of canonicals ignored by Google, so I'm just trying to gauge if it's an issue or not.
-
Hi Ruth,
Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas)
You say the following:
- Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.
Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored.
There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands)
Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted)
Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.
-
Google can definitely choose to ignore the canonical tag, especially if they think that the page in question is a better solution to a query. I agree with the other respondents that the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level, so the duplicate content isn't an issue on your site anymore. In the meantime, some things to try:
- Make sure that your internal hierarchy makes the canonical versions more important than the duplicate versions, i.e. they appear farther up in your site nav and have more internal links pointing to them.
- Try building some external links to those pages as well, where you can.
- Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.
Are any of the duplicate pages receiving organic search traffic? If not, it may be that Google has indexed them but understands they're not as important. Again, though, the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level.
-
Sent an email, have you received it?
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks will check it out on Deep crawl hope to find out what is going on.
Tom
-
Hi Tom,
I use Moz, Screaming Frog and this canonical checker: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/canonical/dcckfeohihhlbeobohobibjbdobjbhbo?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog I'm sure that these canonicals are set up correctly.
I will send you an email to the email you have included on your profile.
Thanks,
Tom
-
It sounds to me like your problem is your CMS and your inability to access Google Webmaster tools. If you're going off of Google analytics, that's not going to tell you entire story. Use Moz, Deep Crawl, or screaming frog to determine other or not your canonicals are set up correctly.
It is possible that they're being blocked I some code error. And not being picked up by Googlebot.
Please run your site through the tools suggested and let me know if you need help in the form of somebody to run those tools for you I am willing to add that it is a code error, not Google deciding to ignore properly set up canonicals.
Google Analytics will show you whenever somebody has clicked on it does not mean that the bot is following that URL.
Without seeing more I really couldn't tell you much more unfortunately. If you can private message me with your domain if you'd like and I will check it out.
Hope this helps,Tom
Tom
-
Thank you for your responses. Hopefully someone who may have experienced this before will be able to contribute. It seems there's very little in this area about the potential impacts.
-
I believe you could be at risk of duplicate content issues. If it were my client, I'd definitely consider this a code-red issue and attack it from all possible angles.
-
Yep clean URLs there.
So, do you believe that Google ignoring these canonicals is something we should be worried about? (Basically setting a high priority so development sorts these issues out)
-
Hmm...only other thing I can think of is your that XML sitemap may contain these additional URL strings, but I assume you've already got clean URLs there.
-
Yeah they're definitely right, as a whole our canonicals Google agree with, but there's various batches that Google chooses to ignore.
Unfortunately I don't have access to search console, I have access to GA but that's it. I have to rely on third party tools and other things to try and see the impact. We also have a very restrictive platform which requires things to go through development. So i'm just trying to gauge the seriousness of this issue so that I can do a priority list.
To put the scale into perspective, it looks as if Google is ignoring the majority of our product URLs (thanks to a product recommendation software we use) and is using a different url path. Same with breadcrumbs.
255k indexed pages, ignored canonicals that i've found run to about 15k from just the two above.
-
That's odd, I've never seen a case where Google ignored canonical tags. Since I don't have an example, I have to ask, are your canonical tags in the right place?
Another thing you might try, have you set up parameter handling in Search Console?
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
-
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
Good day to you Mozers, I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced. This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified. Examples are: Every PoS could have a different price on their product Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change. I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag. i.e: https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential. Question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one. I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on? I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted. Thank you in advance,1 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
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 -
Original Source and Canonical tags
We've been using canonical links to protect site SEO for contributor content and requiring canonical of our partners (as well as tagging internal duplicate content with canonical). Most other media sites have been doing the same but this is a moving target. I'm now hearing that the original source tag is now a better option. Special focus for us is placement on google news. Any guidance?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jbertfield0 -
Index.php canonical/dup issues
Hello my fellow SEOs! I would LOVE some additional insight/opinions on the following... I have a client who is an industry leader, big site, ranks for many competitive phrases, blah blah..you get the picture. However, they have a big dup content/canonical issue. Most pages resolve with and without the /index.php at the end of the URL. Obviously this is a dup content issue but more importantly they SEs sometimes serve an "index.php" version of the page, sometimes they don't, and it is constantly changing which version it serves and the rank goes up and down. Now, I've instructed them that we are going to need to write a sitewide redirect to attempt a uniform structure. Most people would say, redirect to the non index.php version buttttt 1. The index.php pages consistently outperforms the non index.php versions, except the homepage. 2. The client really would prefer to have the "index.php" at the end of the URL The homepage performs extremely well for a lot of competitive phrases. I'd like to redirect all pages to the "index.php" version except the homepage and I'm thinking that if I redirect all pages EXCEPT the homepage to the index.php version, it could cause some unforeseen issues. I can not use rel=canonical because they have many different versions of the their pages with different country codes in the URL..example, if I make the US version canonical, it will hurt the pages trying to rank with a fr URL, de URL, (where fr/de are country codes in the URL depending where the user is, it serves the correct version). Any advice would be GREATLY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeCoughlin0 -
Could adding canonical tags to large Ecommerce site ever hurt rankings? Temporarily?
We have a really large site we're working on who's product pages rank well for the most part but also have multiple products listed in different categories with different URL's. I'm assuming there's no downside to adding canonical tags to these right? Its peak season so I don't want to do anything that could, even temporarily, bring down their rankings. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Use rel=canonical to save otherwise squandered link juice?
Oftentimes my site has content which I'm not really interested in having included in search engine results. Examples might be a "view cart" or "checkout" page, or old products in the catalog that are no longer available in our system. In the past, I'd blocked those pages from being indexed by using robots.txt or nofollowed links. However, it seems like there is potential link juice that's being lost by removing these from search engine indexes. What if, instead of keeping these pages out of the index completely, I use to reference the home page (http://www.mydomain.com) of the business? That way, even if the pages I don't care about accumulate a few links around the Internet, I'll be capturing the link juice behind the scenes without impacting the customer experience as they browse our site. Is there any downside of doing this, or am I missing any potential reasons why this wouldn't work as expected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cadenzajon1