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.
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
-
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools.
The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present?
The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content?
And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second?
I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
-
Thank you for you responses and advice!
-
Very nice addition John.
-
Ryan, spot on as always.
One other thing, it sounds like some of the canonicals you're placing on pages would be better suited to 301 redirects, like correcting a URL for not having a trailing slash or not. If you can avoid using canonicals and use 301 redirects instead, that's the preferred method for resolving duplicate content issues. Canonicals are more for when there are parameters on the URLs, and you can't get away from serving the pages with those parameters.
-
How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present?
The first thing to understand is the canonical tag is a suggestion, not an order. While a search engine will usually honor the canonical tag, there are instances where Google or other SEs may determine the canonical tag is not being used correctly so they disregard the canonical tag. Based on this understanding, yes the robot will read the entire page regardless of the canonical tag status.
Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content?
The two tags you mention conflict. You would never use both tags on the same page.
Noindex means you do not wish the page to appear in the search index. The canonical tag means you do wish the content to be included in the search index, but use the canonical URL in the index.
if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order?
The order of meta tags does not matter. If a page was marked with both a canonical tag and a noindex tag, the noindex tag would take effect and the page would not be indexed, so the canonical tag would not have any effect.
In short, you want to use the canonical tag to resolve duplicate content issues, not the noindex tag.
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 -
No index detected in robots meta tag GSC issue_Help Please
Hi Everyone, We just did a site migration ( URL structure change, site redesign, CMS change). During migration, dev team messed up badly on a few things including SEO. The old site had pages canonicalized and self canonicalized <> New site doesn't have anything (CMS dev error) so we are working retroactively to add canonicalization mechanism The legacy site had URL’s ending with a trailing slash “/” <> new site got redirected to Set of url’s without “/” New site action : All robots are allowed: A new sitemap is submitted to google search console So here is my problem (it been a long 24hr night for me 🙂 ) 1. Now when I look at GSC homepage URL it says that old page is self canonicalized and currently in index (old page with a trailing slash at the end of URL). 2. When I try to perform a live URL test, I get the message "No: 'noindex' detected in 'robots' meta tag" , so indexation cant be done. I have no idea where noindex is coming from. 3. Robots.txt in search console still showing old file ( no noindex there ) I tried to submit new file but old one still coming up. When I click on "See live robots.txt" I get current robots. 4. I see that old page is still canonicalized and attempting to index redirected old page might be confusing google Hope someone can help to get the new page indexed! I really need it 🙂 Please ping me if you need more clarification. Thank you ! Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bgvsiteadmin1 -
Canonical Chain
This is quite advanced so maybe Rand can give me an answer? I often have seen questions surrounding a 301 chain where only 85% of the link juice is passed on to the first target and 85% of that to the next one, up to three targets. But how about a canonical chain? What do I mean by this:? I have a client who sells lighting so I will use a real example (sans domain) I don't want 'new-product' pages appearing in SERPS. They dilute link equity for the categories they replicate and often contain identical products to the main categories and subcategories. I don't want to no index them all together I'd rather tell Google they are the same as the higher category/sub category. (discussion whether a noindex/follow tag would be better?) If I canonicalize new-products/ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 I then subsequently discover that everything in kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 is already in /kitchen-lighting-c17 and I decide to canonicalize those two - so I place a /kitchen-lighting-c17 canonical on /kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217. Then what happens to the new-products canonical? Is it the same rule - does it pass 85% of link equity back to the non new-product URL and 85% of that back to the category? does it just not work? or should I do noindexi/follow Now before you jump in: Let's assume these are done over a period of time because the obvious answer is: Canonicalize both back to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17 I know that and that is not what I am asking. What if they are done in a sequence what is the real result? I don't want to patronise anyone but please read this carefully before giving an answer. Regards Nigel Carousel Projects.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nigel_Carr0 -
Is a 301 Redirect and a Canonical Tag on Uppercase to Lowercase Pages Correct?
We have a medium size site that lost more than 50% of its traffic in July 2013 just before the Panda rollout. After working with a SEO agency, we were advised to clean up various items, one of them being that the 10k+ urls were all mixed case (i.e. www.example.com/Blue-Widget). A 301 redirect was set up thereafter forcing all these urls to go to a lowercase version (i.e. www.example.com/blue-widget). In addition, there was a canonical tag placed on all of these pages in case any parameters or other characters were incorporated into a url. I thought this was a good set up, but when running a SEO audit through a third party tool, it shows me the massive amount of 301 redirects. And, now I wonder if there should only be a canonical without the redirect or if its okay to have tens of thousands 301 redirects on the site. We have not recovered yet from the traffic loss yet and we are wondering if its really more of a technical problem than a Google penalty. Guidance and advise from those experienced in the industry is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK7170 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Infinite Scrolling: how to index all pictures
I have a page where I want to upload 20 pictures that are in a slideshow. Idea is that pictures will only load when users scroll down the page (otherwise too heavy loading). I see documentation on how to make this work and ensure search engines index all content. However, I do not see any documentation how to make this work for 20 pictures in a slideshow. It seems impossible to get a search engines to index all such pictures, when it shows only as users scroll down a page. This is documentation I am already familiar with, and which does not address my issue:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi5
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload http://luis-almeida.github.io/unveil/ thank you0 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Any penalty for having rel=canonical tags on every page?
For some reason every webpage of our website (www.nathosp.com) has a rel=canonical tag. I'm not sure why the previous SEO manager did this, but we don't have any duplicate content that would require a canonical tag. Should I remove these tags? And if so, what's the advantage - or disadvantage of leaving them in place? Thank you in advance for your help. -Josh Fulfer
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhans1