Canonical in head best practice
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Hi
Is putting a list of canonical no follow links in the head the best practice? From SEO Moz analysis urls of duplicate content was flagged but now I have lots of cononicals in the head of my doc and the code looks untidy
see head here : http://carpetflooringsdirect.com/
Is there a cleaner way of doing this? and how do I retest to see if I have fixed?
Many thanks
Matt
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Add a screenshot of the errors. This will give us more info to be able to help you.
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So i have told the search engines not to follow.
No you haven't. You have told the search engines that homepage is a canonical version of all these other URLs, which doesn't make sense and is most probably confusing the engines.
I would remove these asap.
Then take a closer look at the error craw diagnostic summary. Perhaps include a screenshot if you're still unsure.
The canonical tag is to tell search engines which version of the page to index if you have variations of the same page which could occur through querystring parameters or something simple like this:
In this scenario you would simple add a this to the <HEAD> section of your index.html page to tell Google to only index http://www.example.com/ since index is exactly the same page.
I would have a read up here as to the correct use of canonical tags - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
Cheers,
Woody
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THanks for this I have remover although I still havent solved my Duplicate content problem...
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You should definitely remove those canonical tags ASAP.
Each page should only have one canonical tag - the correct canonical URL for that page.
Hope that helps!
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THanks Woody - Yes im just down the road...
The Dashboard (craw diagnostic summary) flagged up the Urls as duplicates. So i have told the search engins not to follow - Is this not what I was suposed to do?
Matt
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Hi there,
Not quite sure what you're trying to achieve here, but this is certainly not how the canonical tag is used.
I would remove these asap from the homepage before something negative happens to your rankings.
What are you trying to achieve? What was the duplicate content issue?
Woody
Oh, BTW - if your profile name is where you're located, I'm just down the A12 from you in Colchester.
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