Canonical for multi store
-
Hello all,
I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags;
UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com
USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/
Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag?
ie;
UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com
USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/
(please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)
-
Thank you for your help! I thought it was correct, just the Moz team not making it clear that it is a "them" problem, as opposed to a Google problem.
-
This is because Moz hasn't updated their crawling tool to consider hreflang in the equation of reporting "duplicates". They've acknowledged that. They might update it in the future. But for now, you just have to ignore pages being reported as duplicate if you know that they are properly linked by hreflang to distinguish countries or languages.
Self-referencing canonical tags are a best practice, and will give an important correct signal to the search engines, which is more important than cleaning up reported warnings in the Moz crawl.
-
This is what I thought, but the Moz team provided conflicting information because a lot of my URLs are showing as duplicates in MozPro.
This was their response:
After looking into your Campaign, it seems that this issue is happening because of the way some of your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to themselves as canonicals, which basically negates the canonicals themselves. For example, 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/archive' is considered a duplicate of 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive' because the canonical tags for each page just points back to itself.
This means that each page is being considered as the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that they continue to compete against each other for rankings.
Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical:
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
If A references A as canonical and B references B, then A and B are considered duplicatesThe examples you've provided actually fall into the fifth example I've listed above.
-
You should stick with two different canonicals. Self-referencing in each case. And use hreflang tags to link the country-specific variations together.
Pointing both pages to one single canonical is telling the search engine to only index one of those pages.
The self-referencing canonical in this case is simply to deal with variations of the base URL, like in case it has query strings, or http vs. https, or www vs not, etc.
Where you would want to point two different pages to one canonical is when you only want one of those pages to be indexed. If the content is duplicate, the search engine would likely make that choice for you. So, including a canonical lets you give a directive to the search engine, instead of deferring to it on the choice of which.
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
-
Do cross domain rel canonical and original source tags have to be the same?
I have placed content on a partner site using the same content that is on my site. I want the link juice from the site and the canonical tag points back to my site. However, they are also using the original source tag as they publish a lot of news. If they have the original source tag as the page on their site and the canonical as mine, is this killing the link juice from the canonical and putting me in jeopardy of a duplicate content penalty? Google has already started indexing the page on their site with the same content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SecuritiesCE0 -
Pagination parameters and canonical
Hello, We have a site that manages pagination through parameters in urls, this way: friendly-url.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
friendly-url.html?p=2
friendly-url.html?p=3
... We've rencently added the canonical tag pointing to friendly-url.html for all paginated results. In search console, we have the "p" parameter identified by google.
Now that the canonical has been added, should we still configure the parameter in search console, and tell google that it is being use for pagination? Thank you!0 -
What is better? No canonical or two canonicals to different pages?
I have a blogger site that is adding parameters and causing duplicate content. For example: www.mysite.com/?spref=bl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TMI.com
www.mysite.com/?commentPage=1 www.mysite.com/?m=1 www.mysite.com/?m=0 I decided to implement a canonical tag on these pages pointing to the correct version of the page. However, for the parameter ?m=0, the canonical keeps pointing to itself. Ex: www.mysite.com/?m=0 The canonical = www.mysite.com/?m=0 So now I have two canonicals for the same page. My question is if I should leave it, and let Google decide, or completely remove the canonicals from all pages?0 -
Exact Syntax for Canonical to PDFs for Windows Server
Hi There, I have got in my web several PDFs with the same content of the HTML version. Thus I need to set up a canonical for each of them in order to avoid duplicate content. In particular, I need to know how to write the exact syntax for the windows server (web.config) in order to implement the canonical to PDF. I surfed the web but it seems I cannot find this piece of info anywhere Thanks a lot!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Midleton0 -
Robots.txt Blocked Most Site URLs Because of Canonical
Had a bit of a "Gotcha" in Magento. We had Yoast Canonical Links extension which worked well , but then we installed Mageworx SEO Suite.. which broke Canonical Links. Unfortunately it started putting www.mysite.com/catalog/product/view/id/516/ as the Canonical Link - and all URLs with /catalog/productview/* is blocked in Robots.txt So unfortunately We told Google that the correct page is also a blocked page. they haven't been removed as far as I can see but traffic has certainly dropped. We have also , at the same time had some Site changes grouping some pages & having 301 redirects. Resubmitted site map & did a fetch as google. Any other ideas? And Idea how long it will take to become unblocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Canonical vs noindex for blog tags
Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Hash as a Replacement for Absolute URL in Canonical Tags?
Any idea why companies like Skechers would be doing this: http://screencast.com/t/ooEkATGN7EX ? I suppose it makes sense, but I've never seen it done before. If this works, why on earth would we be using absolute URLs still?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0