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.
Do we need to use the canonical tag on non-indexed pages?
-
Hi there
I have been working in / learning SEO for just over a year, coming from a non dev background, so there are still plenty of the finer points on-page points I am working on. Slowly building up confidence and knowledge with the great SEOMoz as a reference!
We are working on this site http://www.preciseuk.co.uk (we are still tweaking the tags and content by the way- not finished yet!)
Because a lot of the information is within accordians, a page is generated for each tab of the accordian expanded, for example:
http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php is the main page
but then you also have:
http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=0 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=1 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=2 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=3 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=4 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=5
All of which are in the same file.
According to the crawl test, these pages are not indexed.
Because it is all in one file, should we add the canonical tag to it, so that this is replicated in all the tab pages that are generated? eg.
Thanks in advance for your help!
Liz
OneResult
liz@oneresult.co.uk -
Ok, this may be a better option in Webmaster tools, since you need to have added robots txt or "nofollow, noindex" to the pages...which we can't do because they are all one file.
Many thanks everyone
Liz
-
Sounds fine. You could also go into webmaster tools as well and tell them to ignore the 'tab' parameter
Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling
Although if you're changing it to # you shouldn't need to
-
Having talked to the guys and developers, while re-coding the whole site is not feasible for this project, we are going to prevent these pseudo pages being an issue by:
- adding a rel canonical tag to the main pages
- add the # symbol after the .php section of the code so that the search engines ignore it
- request that Google remove the few URLs that may have been indexed
-
Yes on second thoughts the URL structure would only need to be changed if the individual tabs were meant to be different pages, it's just that the coding has split them up, as you say.
-
Yeah, definitely speak to the developers, see what they can do. You'll learn that SEO often requires us to box clever around what developers do
Your url structure isn't bad, it's simply that these tabs shouldn't be seperate pages at all.
-
Hi Barry,
Yeah I use yootheme templates for Joomla and Wordpress and they seem to use some sort of javascript to do it really well, i think its called MOOtools
-
Thanks everyone so far, great stuff.
I did not build this site so I cannot speak for the way it was put together! I am not a developer at all but I can tell it is not the best solution.
So the best course of action seems to be, use the tag and then look into the time and costs associated with converting the URLs to a more friendly structure...
-
Eh, yes, you probably should.
However, why are you building your pages that way and not making the tabs javascript (or similar)?
There has to be a better way of doing it than making each it's own php file, because you're just deliberately giving yourself duplicate content issues. I'm not much of a coder though so perhaps somebody who is can wade in with an actual alternative solution.
If you really have to make it that way, then definitely use the canonical to the non-tabbed version.
-
I think it would be safer to add the tag, although search engines are getting more clever this way you would be making sure search engines recognise the link you want to be indexed. Hope that makes sense.
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
Hi I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary? Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name thank you
On-Page Optimization | | lina_digital0 -
Multiple H1 tags on Squarespace blog page?
Hi All, I use Squarespace and while running my site (https://www.growmassagebusiness.com) through programs am seeing that my blog posts are being seen as one page with multiple H1 tags. I read through the SS help desk and found back in 2015 someone wrote that it's not a bit deal b/c of HTML5 and that the search engines will read each blog post as a sub-page. I'm not so sure about that and wondering what the experts think? If that is screwy then I'm considering possibly making each blog post it's own page rather than using their blog posting format.
On-Page Optimization | | rajam0 -
New site pages are indexed but not ranking for anything
I just built this site for a client http://primedraftarchitecture.com. It went live 3 weeks ago and the pages are getting indexed as per Webmaster Tools. But I'm not seeing it rank for anything. We're adding blog articles regularly and used Moz Local for local links and have been building links in other local directories (probably about 15 so far). Usually I get some rankings, although very low, after just a week or two for new sites. Does anyone see anything glaring that may be causing a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | DonaldS1 -
Is it OK to include name of your town to the title tag or H1 tag on a blog to enhance local search results
I recently attended a webinar by ETNA Interactive on local search SEO. The presenter recommended including the name of your town in the title of the blog to increase local search SEO. Is this OK? Ive always been concerned that it is such an obvious attempt to rank locally that Google would consider it "spammy" ? black hat, "sketchy" or otherwise manipulative. Have the rules changed? Is it OK to do? Brooke
On-Page Optimization | | wianno1680 -
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
Hey guys! I was looking at adding the H1 tag lower on the page than the H2 tag because I want the top bit to be a call to action. Is this proper practice?
On-Page Optimization | | Web3Marketing870 -
Page Title in Local SEO Title Tags?
Hi All, Still working on my title tag usage for local SEO, and I was hoping for some more feedback. My question is this: In Local SEO titles, I'm using location + keyword combinations, unique on each page. However, since each page has a specific title for the client, I figure I should be placing that at the front. My thought here was that this helps with the overall usability to the reader of the website. Ex. Contact Us page for Pizza shop Contact Us | Springfield IN Gourmet Pizza | Moe's Italian Pizza Anyone have thoughts on this one? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | kbaltzell0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0