Rel canonical = can it hurt your SEO
-
I have a site that has been developed to default to the non-www version. However each page has a rel canonical to the non-www version too.
Could having this in place on all pages hurt the site in terms of search engines?
thanks
Steve
-
Thanks Yannick, much appreciated.
-
Ah. Yes. Delete the tag.
It's not giving the right signals if it is saying that the page you are currently on is a copy of the page you are currently on.
It's not meant to be used site wide.
Bing has an interesting article about it.
-
Hey Yannick. Thanks
And just to be clear. There is 1 file for each page serving bot www & non-www version with a 301 redirect pointing all requests to the non-www URL.
The rel canonical is in every file so search engines will see the rel canonical on every request.
I'm thinking this MUST have some effect on the site. What to you think?
-
Search enigines wont even reach the rel canical tag, because they'll be redirected before anything else loads from the www version.
Just make sure you do link building to the non www version.
-
Hi Yannick
Thanks for the reply. I've been working on "on page" stuff for the last month for a site and noticed that I'm getting no improvement at all in ranking.
This is very unusual I think.
The tech guys on the site are 301'ing to the non-www site AND have placed a re canonical to the non-www version too.
My thought are to have the rel canonical removed as there is a 301 (.htaccess) in place.
Thanks again
Steve
-
I would say, Yes.
In my opinion, but I don't think there has been any concise research about this, a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect passes a lot of link juice to the page it is redirecting to, but not all. So I would say yes, this is hurting your SEO because you're not keeping all the juice you could keep when not using the rel = canonical. (or a redirect for that matter)
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 Canonicals not working properly.
We recently implemented rel=canonicals on a few of our pages to prevent query parameters from showing up in the SERPs. The two pages we added the tags to are no longer ranking. The pages used to rank very well for branded terms such as "morningstar direct" and "morningstar sustainability", but now don't show up at all. When you search for the urls specifically, for example "products/direct morningstar" the query parameter is still indexing. Does anyone know why this might be or what we can do to fix this issue? The two pages are www.morningstar.com/products/direct and https://www.morningstar.com/company/sustainability
Technical SEO | | jmigdal0 -
Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Wordpress rel next & previous for SEO
Hi, I have implemented this function into my wordpress theme. However, I can only get the prev rel to show up. Does anyone have an idea? function rel_next_prev(){
Technical SEO | | SEOhughesm
global $paged; if ( get_previous_posts_link() ) { ?>
} if ( get_next_posts_link() ) { ?>
} }
add_action( 'wp_head', 'rel_next_prev' );
?>0 -
SEO Issues
Hi, We have created a moving cost calculator tools and other moving company can added this tools their website. This is the code: [ <iframe src="http: www.enakliyat.com.tr="" fiyat-hesapla.aspx"="" height="554" width="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:none;"> ] when the other moving company added this code their websites, tool also works on the site and the tool make the referrals traffic our site.** Is it right using this method?**</iframe src="http:> http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-fiyatlari-hesaplama/ here is the tool
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
Does all in one seo pack still have a rel canonical issue?
Hi All, I know that the all in one had errors in its rel canonical links on Wordpress but I wondered if this has been fixed. I get mixed info on the web. Anyone know for sure? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | xvpn9020 -
Canonical Tag - Magento - Help
Hello, I was hoping to get some help or tips on how to best control the canonical tag on a Magento based website. When you go into the Magento admin and enable the option to use the canonical tag on pages, all that does is input the canonical tag to the exact page just with the http:// in the url. My goal is to use the canonical tag on specific pages and point it to other pages, not just the same page with an http:// For example, right now for page: example.com/question/baseball the canonical tag is pointing to http://example.com/question/baseball What i want is to be able to do is take: example.com/question/baseball and have the canonical tag point to example.com/question/baseballbats Is this possible? Does what I'm saying make sense? Please let me know what you all think.... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Questionable SEO
Chess Telecom appears first when you search for 'business phone lines' in the UK so I used a campaign to check them out. It seems they've got tons of unrelated links and using comment spamming to increase their ranking. Along with fake twitter accounts and other things. Search for 'jewel jubic chess' and you'll see what i mean. I assumed this wasnt a good idea and been trying to get my link on relevant websites only. Any comments or suggestions? Should I simply trust that google will hopefully punish them eventually? Or should I be fighting fire with fire? Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0