How does one know where to insert the right strips of coding on the right pages for Canonical Links?
-
On my Website, I am the only SEO optimizer wizard person. I have to teach myself everything and I get overwhelmed a lot. I recently started using SEOMOZ and on my report it stated we had duplicate page titles and that it was bad and should be fixed quickly. So I did my research and found that I needed to use canonical links to reference one page to be indexed. However my problem lies in exactly how to add this coding to my site. I greatly appreciate any help or at least looking at this question.
-
Hey Justin,
Basically the bots follow the links so it might follow example.com and example.com/index.html once it get to your actual page it then reads the canonical tag which indicates which version is the correct version to use.
Hope that helps
-
Hi Justin,
Yes you have to use the code on all pages that are marked as duplicate. So for example if you have 5 pages shoeing as duplicate content you will have one as main page or the master or whatever you want to call it. You tehn place the code supplied by Aaran and Craig in the head section of the other 4 pages.
D
-
Thanks for the coding, I still have a part left hanging at least maybe in my own mind it is. How does that strip of code reference the correct pages together? Does it just see there are duplicate pages and bundle them for the Search Engine? or do I have to place other codes in my site to target those pages?
-
Hey
Quite easy really just add the following snippet
rel="canonical" href="Your URL Here" />
This should be placed between the tags of the page.
BUT.......
Make sure you are using this correctly, if you have duplicate page titles due to canonicalisation (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/basics-of-search-engine-friendly-design-and-development) then that's fine but if its just because you have duplicate page titles across your pages then they need to be rewritten.
Hope that helps
-
This is the format of the canonical tag
You have to add this within the tags. But to getting the current page URL involves dynamic scripting and it depends on which CMS you are using.
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
-
Link equity when merging product pages
Hi, our e-commerce website has just over 900 products. A vast majority are very unique and not similar to one another. However, early in our development, we listed similar variations separately. For example, we had a separate product listing for different color options: Black, Tan, and Green. They do not rank too great by themselves. However, the product is very popular and the search volume is near 9k a month. Our competitors have one listing with several color options, which is what we are proposing. We would enable 301 redirects from the Tan and Green options, which would redirect to the new variation listing. Is this wise? We want to capitalize on this opportunity, and apply this practice for other product listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndrewColvin0 -
Forum generating automatically extra pages. Can I solve it with canonical?
Hey there Webmasters of the Universe. So i have this problem with my forum. The platform I am using it automatically creates extra pages for every page. For exampleIf my forum had one page called forum.com/examplethe same page you can find at forum.com/example?page=1If I set rel canonical into the second one pointing to the first one will that cause a problem for me?Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
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 -
What's the best way to check Google search results for all pages NOT linking to a domain?
I need to do a bit of link reclamation for some brand terms. From the little bit of searching I've done, there appear to be several thousand pages that meet the criteria, but I can already tell it's going to be impossible or extremely inefficient to save them all manually. Ideally, I need an exported list of all the pages mentioning brand terms not linking to my domain, and then I'll import them into BuzzStream for a link campaign. Anybody have any ideas about how to do that? Thanks! Jon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonMorrow0 -
Structure: Should an eCommerce blog have main menu links to each of the store category pages?
Hi, Should my eCommerce site's blog have menu links to the store's category pages? (like in the store itself) The meaning is that every blog post page will have links to category pages that are not related and probably weakens the in-text relevant links. The other option is to have menu links only to the blog category pages and in-article links to the relevant store category pages (maybe add menu button "Go to Store"). Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Link Juice + multiple links pointing to the same page
Scenario
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links. Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact? Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated. Thanks Mark0 -
Rel Canonical on Home Page
I have a client who says they can't implement a 301 on their home page. They have tow different urls for their home page that are live and do not redirect. I know that the best solution would be to redirect one to the main URL but they say this isn't possible. So they implemented the rel canonical instead. Is this the second best solution for them if they can't redirect? Will the link juice be passed through the rel canonical? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0