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
-
Is there a way to get Google to index more of your pages for SEO ranking?
We have a 100 page website, but Google is only indexing a handful of pages for organic rankings. Is there a way to submit to have more pages considered? I have optimized meta data and get good Moz "on-page graders" or the pages & terms that I am trying to connect....but Google doesn't seem to pick them up for ranking. Any insight would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | JulieALS0 -
Best strategy to handle over 100,000 404 errors.
I recently been given a site that has over one-hundred thousand 404 error codes listed in Google Webmasters. It is really odd because according to Google Webmasters, the pages that are linking to these 404 pages are also pages that no longer exist (they are 404 pages themselves). These errors were a result of site migration that had occurred. Appreciate any input on how one might go about auditing and repairing large amounts of 404 errors. Thank you.
Technical SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
What is the best way to refresh a webpage of a news site, SEO wise?
Hello all, we have a client which is a sports website. In fact it is a veyr big website and has a huge number of news per day. This is mostly the reason why it refreshes some of its pages with news list every 420 seconds. We currently use meta refresh. I have read here and elsewhere that meta refreshes should be avoided. But we don't do it to send to another page and pass any kind of page authority / juice. Is in this case javascript refresh better? Is there any other better way. What do you think & suggest? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | pkontopoulos0 -
50,000 pages or a page with parameters
I have a site with about 12k pages on a topic... each of these pages could use another several pages to go into deeper detail about the topic. So, I am wondering, for SEO purposes would it be better to have something like 50,000 new pages for each sub topic or have one page that I would pass parameters to and the page would be built on the fly in code behind. The drawback to the one page with parameters is that the URL would be static but the effort to implement would be minimal. I am also not sure how google would index a single page with parameters. The drawback to the 50k pages model is the dev effort and possibly committed some faux pas by unleashing so many links to my internal pages. I might also have to mix aspx with html because my project can't be that large. Anyone here ever have this sort of choice to make? Is there a third way I am not considering?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
ECommerce: Best Practice for expired product pages
I'm optimizing a pet supplies site (http://www.qualipet.ch/) and have a question about the best practice for expired product pages. We have thousands of products and hundreds of our offers just exist for a few months. Currently, when a product is no longer available, the site just returns a 404. Now I'm wondering what a better solution could be: 1. When a product disappears, a 301 redirect is established to the category page it in (i.e. leash would redirect to dog accessories). 2. After a product disappers, a customized 404 page appears, listing similar products (but the server returns a 404) I prefer solution 1, but am afraid that having hundreds of new redirects each month might look strange. But then again, returning lots of 404s to search engines is also not the best option. Do you know the best practice for large ecommerce sites where they have hundreds or even thousands of products that appear/disappear on a frequent basis? What should be done with those obsolete URLs?
Technical SEO | | zeepartner1 -
Indexed pages and current pages - Big difference?
Our website shows ~22k pages in the sitemap but ~56k are showing indexed on Google through the "site:" command. Firstly, how much attention should we paying to the discrepancy? If we should be worried what's the best way to find the cause of the difference? The domain canonical is set so can't really figure out if we've got a problem or not?
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
How to handle (internal) search result pages?
Hi Mozers, I'm not quite sure what the best way is to handle internal search pages. In this case it's for an ecommerce website with about 8.000+ products and search pages currently look like: example.com/search.php?search=QUERY+HERE. I'm leaning towards making them follow, noindex. Since pages like this can be easily abused for duplicate content and because I'd rather have the category pages ranked. How would you handle this?
Technical SEO | | Qon0 -
Does Google see page with Trailing Slash as different
My company is purchasing another company's website. We are moving their entire site onto our CMS and the IT guys are working hard to replicate the URL structure. Several of the category pages are changing slightly and I am not sure if it matters: Old URL - http://www.DOMAIN.com/products/adults New URL - http://www.DOMAIN.com/products/adults**/** Notice the trailing slash? Will Google treat the new page as the same as the old one or as completely different (i.e. new) page? P.S. - Yes, I can setup 301s but since these pages hold decent rankings I'd really like to keep it exactly the same.
Technical SEO | | costume0