Home page canonical issues
-
I think I’ve got a canonical issue with a client’s site that I’m having problems with
I’ve noticed in their analytics that they receive traffic from themselves.
I’ve used ‘ rel canonical’ throughout the site to avoid any dup issues and I have 301’ed every other variation of the home page I can think of.
I don’t have full access to the back end of the host to control any of the iis as it’s an asp site.
They seem to be getting traffic from their site under the URL of,
I’ve 301 redirected
And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas?
Thanks
-
You're welcome, glad I could help
-
Hi Martin, thanks for your answer I really appreciate your quick reply which has solved the problem for me, I seem to be looking for problems lately!
-
Thanks for the positive feedback
-
Nice response Martin. Very clear cut.
-
I have yet to come across an Analytics campaign where the traffic report doesn't show some traffic from the site we're analysing. The reason is that people visit the home page from the other pages so it's basically an 'internal referral'. What you want to use is the landing page analysis instead, or just use the filters to exclude example.com referrals.
If you're redirecting all variants of the home page to root and your canonical is going to root, then you should be fine.
Check using a site:example.com search in Google and if you only have root and no /default.asp /index.asp etc then it's fine and you don't have an actual canonical problem - which is what I suspect.
I think it's just ensuring you look at the right analytics reports now and don't get confused in the myriad reports it lets you have.
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
-
Home Page Deindexed overnight?
Hi, Hope you guys can help. I run an e-commerce site https://alloywheels.com Last night our home page (and a few other pages, but not all) were de-indexed by Google. The site has been ranking (UK) for years in P1 for the "alloy wheels" keyword and on the whole been running very successfully. However recently I have noticed from fluctuation on the "alloy wheels" keyword, dropping to P3 then P5 then back to P3, but this morning I noticed we were not even ranking on the first page. When I check inside Search Console there are no messages or warnings but the "/" page was de-indexed. There were a few other key pages that were also de-indexed. I have request reindexing and they have come back, P7 for the home page for "alloy wheels" The only thing I have changed was I realised yesterday there was no robots.txt on the site and was being recommended by web.dev to add one, so I did. It was just an allow all: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | JamesDolden
Disallow Sitemap: https://alloywheels.com/sitemap.xml I ran tests on the robots.txt before it was uploaded and it all came green. I have removed the robots.txt for now. Has anybody seen anything like this before? With the recent ranking fluctuation I am not sure whether it is to do with that, the robots.txt or something different altogether? Thanks in advance, James0 -
Thousands of 404-pages, duplicate content pages, temporary redirect
Hi, i take over the SEO of a quite large e-commerce-site. After checking crawl issues, there seems to be +3000 4xx client errors, +3000 duplicate content issues and +35000 temporary redirects. I'm quite desperate regarding these results. What would be the most effective way to handle that. It's a magento shop. I'm grateful for any kind of help! Thx,
Technical SEO | | posthumus
boris0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Canonicalization Issue?
Good day! I am not sure if my company has a Canonicalization issue? When typing in www.cushingco.com the site redirects to http://www.cushingco.com/index.shtml A visitor can also type in http://cushingco.com/index.shtml into a web browser and land on our homepage (and the url will be http://www.cushingco.com/index.shtml) A majority of websites that link to our company point to: http://www.cushingco.com/index.shtml We are in the process of cleaning up citations and pulling together a content marketing strategy/editorial calendar. I want to be sure folks interested in linking to us have the right url. Please ask me any questions to help narrow down what we might be doing incorrectly. Thanks in advance!! Jon
Technical SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Adding Rel Canonical to multiple pages
Hi, Our CMS generates a lot of duplicate content, (Different versions of every page for 3 different font sizes). There are many other reasons why we should drop this current CMS and go with something else, and we are in the process of doing that. But for now, does anyone know how would I do the following: I've created a spreadsheet that contains the following: Column 1: rel="canonical" tag for URL Column 2: Duplicate Content URL # 1 Column 3: Duplicate Content URL # 2 Column 4: Duplicate Content URL # 3 I want to add the tag from column 1 into the head of every page from column 2,3, and 4. What would be a fast way to do this considering that I have around 1800 rows. Check the screenshot of the builtwith.com result to see more information about the website if that helps. Farris bxySL
Technical SEO | | jdossetti0 -
On page audit throws a rel="canonical" curve ball :-(
Good Morning from -3 Degrees C, still no paths gritted wetherby UK 😞 Following an on page audit one recommendation instructs me to ad:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.barrettsteel.com/" /> on the home page of barrett steel. I'm confused, i thought i only had to add this to duplications
the home page which to my knowledge dont exist. So my question is please: "Why shoul i ad this snippet of code on the home page of http://www.barrettsteel.com http://www.barrettsteel.com/" /> Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850 -
Importance of an optimized home page (index)
I'm helping a client redesign their website and they want to have a home page that's primarily graphics and/or flash (or jquery). If they are able to optimize all of their key sub-pages, what is the harm in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | EricVallee340