Best way to handle different views of the same page?
-
Say I have a page: mydomain.com/page
But I also have different views:
/?sort=alpha
/print-version
/?session_ID=2892
etc. All same content, more or less.
Should the subsequent pages have ROBOTS meta tag with noindex? Should I use canonical? Both?
Thanks!
-
I generally trust Duane, so I'd take it at some value - I just haven't seen that problem pop up much, practically. Theoretically, you'd create a loop - so, if it leaked, it would keep looping/leaking until no juice was left. That seems like an odd way to handle the issue.
My bigger concern would be the idea that, if you rel-canonical every page, Bing might not take your important canonical tags seriously. They've suggested they do this with XML sitemaps, too - if enough of the map is junk, they may ignore the whole thing. Again, I haven't seen any firm evidence of this, but it's worth keeping your eyes open.
-
What do you think about what Duane said, about assigning value to itself, could this be a LJ leak as it would be a leak if it was assigning value to anouther page?
-
I haven't seen evidence they'll lose trust yet, but it's definitely worth noting. Google started out saying that, too, but then eased up, because they realized it was hard enough to implement canonical tags even close to correctly (without adding new restrictions). I agree that, in a perfect world, it shouldn't just be a Band-aid.
-
I am not sure if SEOMoz will, but search engines wont as it wont be in their index.
-
Thanks gentlemen. I will probably just go with the NOINDEX in the robots meta tag and see how that works.
Interesting side note, SEOmoz will still report this as a duplicate page though ;-( Hopefully the search engines won't.
-
Yes i agree for most it is probably not going to be a problem, But Duane again yesterday blogged about this, he did say they can live with it. but they dont like it, and the best thing is to fix it. http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/11/29/nine-things-you-need-to-control.aspx
this leaves me in 2 minds, he said that they may lose trust in all your canonicals if they see it over used, this can be a worry if you have used it for its true use elsewhere.
I also worry about lose of link juice, as Duanes words in the first blog post were, "Please pass any value from itself to itself"
does that mean it loses link juice in the process like a normal canonical does?
I myself would fix it anouther way, but this may be a lot of work and bother for some. Thats why I say its a hard one.
-
I'll 80% agree with Alan, although I've found that, in practice, the self-referencing canonical tag is usually fine. It wasn't the original intent, but at worst the search engines ignore it. For something like a session_ID, it can be pretty effective.
I would generally avoid Robots.txt blocking, as Alan said. If you can do a selective META NOINDEX, that's a safer bet here (for all 3 cases). You're unlikely to have inbound links to these versions of your pages, so you don't have to worry too much about link-juice. I just find that Robots.txt can be unpredictable, and if you block tons of pages, the search engines get crabby.
The other option for session_ID is to capture that ID as a cookie or server session, then 301-redirect to the URL with no session_ID. This one gets tricky fast, though, as it depends a lot on your implementation.
Unless you're seeing serious problems (like a Panda smackdown), I'd strongly suggest tackling one at a time, so that you can measure the changes. Large-scale blocking and indexation changes are always tricky, and it's good to keep a close eye on the data. If you try to remove everything at once, you won't know which changes accomplished what (good or bad). It all comes down to risk/reward. If you aren't having trouble and are being proactive, take it one step at a time. If you're having serious problems, you may have to take the plunge all at once.
-
This is a hard one, cannonical is the easy choice, but Bing advises against it, as you should not have a canonical pointing to itself, it could lead to lose of trust in your website. I would not use the robots for this as you lose your flow of link juice
I would try to no-index follow all pages excpt for the true canonical page using meta tags, this means some sort of server side detection of when to place the tags.
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
-
What's the best way for users to upload their images to my wordpress site to promote UGC
I have looked at lots of different plugins and wanted a recommendation for an easy way for patients of ours to upload pictures of them out partying and having fun and looking beautiful so future users can see the final results instead of sometimes gory or difficult to understand before and after images. I'd like to give them the opportunity to write captions (like facebook or insta posts and would offer them incentives to do so. I don't want it to be too complicated for them or have too many steps or barriers but I do want it to look nice and slick and modern. Also do you think this would have a positive impact on SEO? I was also thinking of a Q&A app where dentists could get Q&A emails and respond - i've been doing AMA sessions and they've been really successful and I would like to bring it into out site and make it native. Thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Smileworks_Liverpool1 -
Titling Category Pages Like You Would a Blog Page?
So, with our 600 or so category pages, I was curious... on each of these category pages we show the top 12 products for that category. In trying to increase click through rate, I wonder if it would be prudent to use some of the strategies I see used for Blog posts with thee category pages. i.e. Instead of Category Name - Website Name How about: Top 12 Kitty Litters We Carry - View the Best and the Rest! Or something like that. And then in the description, I could put, "Number 8 made my jaw drop!!!" (Ok, kidding about that one...) But serious about the initial question... Thanks! Craig
Technical SEO | | TheCraig0 -
Test site got indexed in Google - What's the best way of getting the pages removed from the SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, I'd like your feedback on the following: the test/development domain where our sitebuilder works on got indexed, despite all warnings and advice. The content on these pages is in active use by our new site. Thus to prevent duplicate content penalties we have put a noindex in our robots.txt. However off course the pages are currently visible in the SERP's. What's the best way of dealing with this? I did not find related questions although I think this is a mistake that is often made. Perhaps the answer will also be relevant for others beside me. Thank you in advance, greetings, Folko
Technical SEO | | Yarden_Uitvaartorganisatie0 -
On-Page Problem
Hello Mozzers, A friend has a business website and the on-page stuff is done really bad. He wants to rank for: conference room furnishing, video conference, digital signage. (Don't worry about the keywords, it's just made up for an example.) For these three services he has a page: hiswebsite.com/av AV stands for audio and video and is the h1. If you click on one of the service, the url doesn't change. Like if you click on video conference, just the text changes, the url stays /av. All his targeted pages got an F Grade, I am not surprised, the services titles are in . Wouldn't it be a lot better to make an own page for every service with a targeted keyword, like hiswebsite.com/video-conference All this stuff is on /av, how will a 301 resirect work to all the service pages, does this make sense? Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | grobro1 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
How can I change the page title "two" (artigos/page/2.html) in each category ?
I have some categories and photo galleries that have more than one page (i.e.: http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos and http://www.buffetdomicilio.com/category/artigos/page/2). I think that I must change the tittle and description, but I don't how. I would like to know how can I change the title of each of them without stay with duplicate title and description. Thank you! ahcAORR.jpg
Technical SEO | | otimizador20130 -
How do I 301 redirect a number of pages to one page
I want to redirect all pages in /folder_A /folder_B to /folder_A/index.php. Can I just write one or two lines of code to .htaccess to do that?
Technical SEO | | Heydarian0 -
What is the best way to broaden the reach of our website?
We were specifically targeting the Capital Region of New York and environs and now our goal is to broaden the net to reach potential clients. Should I to drop the location terms we already have baked in to the copy and add broader location terms? OR just add newer terms? We're developing a new design that sharpens our focus, but here is what we have now: http://www.behancommunications.com Thanks for any suggestions
Technical SEO | | PatDowd0