Canonical tags
-
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL.By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense.
Poo
-
Just another one of Googles nice little perks proving that they might just like us SEO's
Cheers!
-
Corey,
Got to give you props on the info and the post. I had not seen it before and now am glad I came to Q&A tonight. Excellent info.
Good CMS advice (if you gotta fix, don't recreate it). Super advice on the canonical.
Boodreaux, given your experience level, if you are not using a CMS like WP or Joomla, make sure your developer understands the custom coding and the various permutations.
Best to both.
-
Jake
Nice hit with the Tag Manager. I did not know about it... Learn something everyday and that is what I love about this gig.
Best.
-
Any Redirect will lose value. A 301 loses a portion of your juice and a 302 gives you nothing. What the canonical tag does is redirect the authority of the page with the tag to the target page you want to hold the authority (usually the parent page, be it Root Domain, primary landing page or a subcategory page)
Google has a new fantastic tool I think everyone should know about called Google Tag Manager. It creates a container under the that you can fill with any tag, Google or non-Google tags. It is fantastic because you don't need your programer to go in and change anything and no need to access code. It gives the power to you to add and remove tags and define the parameters of each one you put in place. in addition it builds the tag for you if you aren't a code wizard. this makes the world of SEO and OSO shake due to the rainbows and sunshine of not having t bother your programer with little fixes like tag adding and removal.
I hope this helped!
Cheers!
-
- It's not hard to implement. It's just one line of code to each page. If you're using software like WordPress or Joomla, there is probably an existing extension that will place it on all pages. If it's a custom site, I wrote your developer some code and explained it here.
- Redirecting old URL's was a good idea (ideally a 301 redirect done by at the web server level).
- Not having canonical tags doesn't necessarily mean that you'll lose 'link juice' (if that's the phrase we're going with), but it can cause canonical issues (lost 'link juice', as well as negative issues that come from duplicate content in the index). Often times, they're little things that you don't even think about (ie. a variable that's automatically ended on URL's by a certain service, like ?utm_source=twitter, an affiliate link, or just an issue of a missing "/" at the end of a web address). With so many possible variables, my philosophy is just to use rel="canonical" everywhere so that you can not worry about it.
Cheers.
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
-
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Despite canonical duplicate content in WMT
Hi, 2 weeks ago we've made big changes in title and meta descriptions. To solve the missing title and descriptions. Also set the right canonical. Now i see that in WMT despite the canonical it shows duplicates in meta descriptions and titles. i've setup the canonical like this:
Technical SEO | | Leonie-Kramer
1. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname
2. url: www.domainname.com/category/listing-family/productname-more-info The canonical on both pages is like this: I'm aware of creating duplicate titles and descriptions, caused by the cms we use and also caused by wrong structure of category/products (we'll solve that nest year) that's why i wanted the canonical, but now it's not going any better, did i do something wrong with the canonical?0 -
Rel=Canonical Help
The site in question is www.example.com/example. The client has added a rel=canonical tag to this page as . In other words, instead of putting the tag on the pages that are not to be canonical and pointing them to this one, they are doing it backwards and putting the same URL as the canonical one as the page they are putting the tag on. They have done this with thousands of pages. I know this is incorrect, but my question is, until the issue is resolved, are these tags hurting them at all just being there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
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, example.com I’ve 301 redirected www.example.com/home.asp www.example.com/default.asp www.example.com/index.asp to www.example.com And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FarkyRafiq0 -
Best Implementation of a Title Tag
If My Targeted keyword are: Mussoorie Hotels Hotels in Mussoorie Mussoorie Resorts Resorts in Mussoorie What of the below 3 will be the best Title Tag After Panda and Penguine ? Hotels and Resorts in Mussoorie Mussoorie Hotels | Mussoorie Resorts | Luxury Budget & Economical Accommodation in Mussoorie Mussoorie Hotels, Mussoorie Resorts, Hotels in Mussoorie, Resorts in Musoorie please suggest!
Technical SEO | | WildHawk0 -
Should I include A Description Tag for an article page
Hi, I am wondering if i should include a description tag for an article page where the news on that page will change around five times a day. I am not sure if to fill a description in for local news or to leave it blank so the search engines pick up the latest local news and then the next day they show the latest local news again in the search engines instead of having a static description of the news page. any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Querystring params, rel canonical and SEO
I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params. There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO? If so, by how much? Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.
Technical SEO | | NicB10