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 tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Pages with similar content: Redirect or Canonical? Or something else?
We have two pages on our site with similar content. One was originally a landing page for a marketing campaign, somewhat of a micro-site feel with a lot of content. We recently optimized another page on the site with much of the same content from the original landing page/micro-site. In order to avoid duplicate content, and to let Google know our authority page is the new page, we're wondering what is best practice: Should we... 301 redirect the old page? No index the old page? Keep both pages and use a canonical to tell Google the new page is authority? Or something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seo_1234b0 -
Review site using canonical tag in a puzzling way.
Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Strange Cross Domain Canonical Issue...
We have 2 identical ecommerce sites. Using 301 is not an option since both are major brands. We've been testing cross domain canonicals for about 2 dozen products, which were pretty successful. Our rankings generally increased. Then things got weird. For the most part, canonicaled pages appeared to have passed link juice since the rankings significantly improved on the other site. The clean URLs (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm) disappeared from the rankings, as they are supposed to, but some were replaced by urls with parameters that Google had indexed (apparently duplicate content). ex: (www.domain.com/product-name/sku.cfm?clicksource?3diaftv). The parametered URLs have the correct canonical tags. In order to try and remove these from Google's index, we: 1. Had the pages fetched in GWT assuming that Google hadn't detected the canonical tage. 2. After we discovered a few hundred of these pages indexed on both sites, we built sitemaps of the offending pages and had the sitemaps fetched. If anyone has any other ideas, please share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Increasing Search Queries
Recently I had a drop in the over all number of search queries my website was ranking for (about 50%) on October 5th. I did not lose rankings for my target keywords. How can I regain these lost opportunities?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raph39880 -
How to Specify Canonical Link Element for Better Performing?
I read Google webmaster centeral's blog post and help article about rel="canonical" which was compiled by Matt. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 I am working on eCommerce website and found too many duplicate pages with same product as follow. 1. www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_62_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
2. www.lampslightingandmore.com/48_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
3. www.lampslightingandmore.com/48_55_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
4. www.lampslightingandmore.com/48_57_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
5. www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
6. www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_56_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
7. www.lampslightingandmore.com/50_63_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
8. www.lampslightingandmore.com/63_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
9. www.lampslightingandmore.com/68_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
10. www.lampslightingandmore.com/68_58_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html
11. www.lampslightingandmore.com/68_59_10133/java-bronze-floor-lamp-with-walnut-shade.html I have consider 1st product as a primary product and set following rel canonical tag on remaining products. Primary product also contain following rel canonical tag. This was my experience to set canonical tag. But, I am not able to see any improvement on crawling. I was in that assumption due to duplication Google did not crawled my pages. But, Now what is problem with it? How can I fix it and specify proper canonical link element for better crawling? Note: I am working to compile unique content on each product pages and make it live very soon.0 -
Query deserves freshness
There was an seomoz article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/does-query-deserves-diversity-algorithm-exist-at-google . I would like to point out the specific part of it - "So - because a lot of searchers express a preference for more diverse results than just those pages that ordinarily would "make the cut," Google provides an extra helping hand to pages they feel help to satisfy those searchers. This data could be gleaned from lower CTRs in the SERPs, greater numbers of query refinements, and even a high percentage of related searches performed subsequently" I don;t understand how data could be gleaned from lower CTRs, don't you think it should have been Higher CTRs ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
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