Canonical
-
i have some static webpages in root and wordpress installed in subdirectory , Canonical tag for the whole website was with trailing slash , i stripped the HTML extensions for static webpages but i can't force to add trailing slash to the static webpages so i changed the canonical for html webpages from http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html/ to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles but the Wordpress" http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/ " still with trailing slash , when i've checked my google webmasters i found that my indexed pages dropped down 100 page !
what should i put in the canonical for the static pages? i tried to strip the slash from wordpress but i failed , so my static webpages canonical with no trailing slash and wordpress with trailing slash .
-
Thanks Dana , can you help me with redirecting non trailing slash to trailing slash at the end , my wordpress is in sub dictionary http://domain.com/blog/
and i have two .htaccess , one in root and one in the wordpress folder.
i tried to solve it by adding that code in the root .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/$1/ [L,R=301]Wordpress give 200 OK with the two versions ( with and without trailing slash ) and that hurts my SEO
Thanks in advanced -
Completely agreed with Dana on this. I recently helped a startup fixing this problem by setting a redirect rule in their nginx configuration to redirect all the URLs with trailing slash to desired version. PFB the required rule if you're using nginx:
rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;
If you're on LAMP/MAMP/WAMP tech stack, find the apace equivalent of this rule and place it in your apache config file. Hope that helps!
-
Hi there,
Every time I get into the "trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash" discussion with my clients I go back and read this excellent post in the Official Google Webmasters Central Blog by Maile Ohye: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Problem for SEO: Both URLs are producing 200 OKAY status codes, resulting in duplicate content. This can interefere with crawl efficiency and fragments link equity.
Solution: Ideally, rather than relying on canonical tags to achieve what you want, 301-redirect the non-preferred versions of your URLs to the preferred version. Only one URL should return a 200 OKAY status code. The other should 301-redirect. This is a better solution than relying on canonical tags.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Added a canonical ref tag and SERPs tanked, should we change it back?
My client's CMS uses an internal linking structure that includes index.php at the end of the URLs. The site also works using SEO-friendly URLs without index.php, so the SEO tool identified a duplicate content issue. Their marketing team thought the pages with index.php would have better link equity and rank higher, so they added a canonical ref tag, making the index.php version of the pages the canonical page. As a result, the site dropped in the rankings by a LOT and has not recovered in the last 3-months. It appears that Google had automatically selected the SEO-friendly URLs as the canonical page, and by switching, it re-indexed the entire site. The question we have is, should they change it back? Or will this cause the site to be reindexed again, resulting in an even lower ranking?
Technical SEO | | TienB240 -
Rel Canonical tag using Wordpress SEO plugin
Hi team I hope this is the right forum for asking this question. I have a site http://hurunuivillage.com built on Wordpress 3.5.1 using a child theme on Genesis 1.9. We're using Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin and I thought it was configured correctly but the Crawl Diagnostics report has identified an issue with the Rel Canonical tag on the sites pages. I have not edited the plugin settings so am surprised the SEOMoz Crawl has picked up a problem. Example: Page URL is http://hurunuivillage.com/ Tag Value http://hurunuivillage.com/ (exactly the same) Page Authority 39 Linking Root Domains 23 Source Code Considering the popularity of the plugin I'm surprised I have not been able to find tutorials to find what I'm doing wrong or should be doing better. Thanks in advance. Best Nic
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Duplicate Page Titles Warnings, htaccess Rewrite & Canonical Links.
Hey guys, Just signed up for a pro account and I am getting Duplicate Page Title warnings on links that are duplicate, rewritten for SEO, but have a canonical href tag. I have two sets of links in my store: SEO friendly: http://www.mysite.com/item/iphone-case Operational link: http://www.mysite.com/shop/product.php?pid=11 This operational link however has a href canonical tag pointing to the SEO friendly link as being the primary link. My question is; Do I need to worry about this Duplicate Page Title Warning if I am using a canonical tag on the Operational link pointing to the SEO friendly link? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jason3600 -
Is the seomoz on-page factor :Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical working properly?
I have a word press site with a rel canonical plug in. The rel="canonical" href= is there and the url in there works and goes to the actual page.So why does the seomoz keep giving the warning: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Technical SEO | | CurtCarroll0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Canonical tags
Hi there, I have just noticed that SEOmoz picked up some duplicates links that I would like to resolve but not sure how. For example, the "Finding work in the arts" article has two links: http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Website&utm_content=Finding+work+in+the+arts&utm_campaign=Footer+Links Both links can be found on this page http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/industry-news-views/article/what-employers-are-looking-for (see attachment). Would automatically generated canonical tags by the CMS solve this issue? rmxiP
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0 -
Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610 -
REL Canonical Error
In my crawl diagnostics it showing a Rel=Canonical error on almost every page. I'm using wordpress. Is there a default wordpress problem that would cause this?
Technical SEO | | mmaes0