Canonical links
-
My website is relatively new, January. We climbed steadily to 6th for our search term then overnight rocketed to 1st. This only lasted a week and have been stuck at 9th ever since.
When I use the SEO Moz tools our site should theoretically be top...I only joined today btw.
Anyway in Google webmaster tools I noticed it said I had duplicate title tags, when I checked to see what the pages were- it was my home page! Google also seems to have cached two versions of our homepage, the root domain and the Default.aspx page.
Now I have fixed this canonical linking issue today (using canonical link tag and 301s) so time will tell but has anyone got any first hand experience of this issue? Was it a big factor?
Thanks!
-
yes just link to "/" or http://domainname.com
-
Yes I had a link to it on every page! None at all now, I'm not entirely sure how else you are supposed to link to your home page but I changed all my links to my root domain just to be sure.
Thanks Alan, I had my suspicions for a long time that it was a weird problem we were suffering from and it does look like that could be the case.
-
It is a big factor, because your home page rank is split wetween the 2, what you want to do, is make sure you dont not have any links to the default.aspx version in your site, one would asume that you do for it to getinto the index.
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
-
One more question about rel=canonical
I'm still trying to wrap my head around rel=canonical and its importance. Thanks to the community, I've been able to understand most of it. Still, I have a couple of very specific questions: I share certain blog posts on the Huffington Post. Here's an example: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/cedric-lizotte/munich-travel-guide_b_13438956.html - Of course I post these on my blog as well. Here: http://www.continentscondiments.com/things-munich-classics/ - Obviously the HuffPo has a huge DA, and I'll never match it. However the original post is mine, on my blog, and not on the HuffPo. They wont - obviously - add a rel=canonical just for me and for the sake of it, they have a million other things to do. QUESTION: Should I add a rel=canonical to my own site pointing to the post on the HuffPost? What would be the advantage? Should I just leave this alone? I share blog posts on Go4TravelBlog too. Example: http://www.go4travelblog.com/dallmayr-restaurant-munich/ - but, once again, the original post is on one of my blogs. In this case, it's on another blog of mine: http://www.thefinediningblog.com/dallmayr-restaurant-in-munich/ QUESTION: Well it's pretty much the same! Should I beg Go4TravelBlog to add a rel=canonical pointing to mine? If they refuse, what do I do? Would it be better to add a rel=canonical from my site to theirs, or do I fight it out and have a rel=canonical pointing to my own post? Why? Thanks a million for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | cedriklizotte0 -
Ecommerce Canonical Question
Hi all, first question (eek) Could I pick the brains of fellow users around an issue we are having with canonical urls on a magento website. At the moment we do not have these enabled as it seems to break our indexing. Cut a long story short, we have thousands of products but haven't rewritten many of the descriptions from the manufacturers yet and so have noindexed all the product pages (freeing them as we go). The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site. For example, if you go to Dresses, there then are several filtering options which would allow you to choose a colour, shape and material - if you wished to filter that precisely. These filtering options are all crawlable and so we would then have a page that google could index for, for example, Green Lace Maxi Dress. All good there, few people search for specific products and a lot search for types of products so we are covered. To get back to the issue at hand. If we enable the canonical option on our magento plugin it will stop us from being able to target these terms. Whereas the filtering option would create domain.com/dress/green/maxi/lace with the page title of Green Lace Maxi Dress, if we enable the canonical part of the seo plugin the canonical link which would be added to the page would be - instantly removing our ability to rank for longer tail dress related searches (we are not going to compete with the big players on the premium terms, yet!). There are alternative plugins we can buy for magento to add the correct tag, however, if every page's canonical just points back it itself like this, is there really much point spending nearly $1000 on the 4 licences we would need to cover our range of sites. Is it really necessary, in this case, that we have a canonical for the product filtering? Sorry for the long post, hope it made sense. Thanks for any assistance.
On-Page Optimization | | DSCarl0 -
Yoast SEO sitemap link 404 problem
I have recently moved my wordpress blog from a subdomain into a directory e.g. www.mysite.com/blog/ and installed yeast SEO however when I go to the site map as directed in the pluign panel www.mysite.com/blog/sitemap_index.xml its not there are I get a 404 error? Any help much appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Rel="canonical" at the same page
Hello Everyone!! We have a Joomla Site and in the template we have a php function that create the **link rel="canonical" **and in the href inserts the same page url. For example, if the we do a search and the url have some cookies. That Url is gonna be the **rel="canonical" **for that page. Is it working correctly? We need an advice to to set it up correctly! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | mycostaricalink0 -
To use a fdqn or relative address in an internal link or not
Is it better to use my fdqn of http://1stclassdriving.co.uk/ or ~/ or ../ and then page name address for internal links or not? or does it just not matter for seo rankings?
On-Page Optimization | | brianw100 -
Limiting On Page Links
Right now, we have about 160 or so links on the home page. It's been recommended that we keep it to under 100, though that's not as big of a deal as it once was. Is it helpful to make a bunch of those links "nofollow" in order to preserve link juice? Is it going to make a difference, or be at all helpful? I assume it won't be harmful, especially as a bunch of them are to the same page but on different sections of the page. Would live your advice and thoughts! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | DeliaAssociates0 -
Too many links on a page?
On my blog posts, I have links to all the categories and months, dating back 5-6 years. This make the number of links on each blog page well over 100, which I understand might decrease the value of each page. Is there a problem with having more than 100 links on a page?
On-Page Optimization | | rdreich492 -
Internal link structure for large site
I am working on a very large directory site which is undergoing a complete redesign. I am considering the internal link structure from first principles. When a site has over 100,000 pages, how do you ensure that each page is linked to from somewhere so that there are no orphans? Trying to get my head around the structure makes my brain hurt. Any tips?
On-Page Optimization | | mascotmike0