Will rel=canonical work here?
-
Dear SEOMOZ groupies,
I manage several real estate sites for SEO which we have just taken over. After running the crawl on each I am find 1000's of errors relating to just a few points and wanted to find out either suggestion to fix or if the rel=canonical will resolve it as it is in bulk. Here are the problems...Every property has the following so the more adverts the more errors.
-
each page has a contact agent url. all of these create dup title and content
-
each advert has the same with printer friendly
-
each advert has same with as a favorites page
several other but I think you get the idea.
Help!!! .... suggestions overly welcome
Steve
-
-
Hi Thanks also as very much appreciated. The no 3 is just another url for a user to choose this page to add to a shortlist. Thanks again to you both.
-
I agree with Tom that rel=canonical should work here, but it does depend a bit on the scope and structure of the site. I might actually META NOINDEX the printable versions, as these are usually dead-ends and have no value to search visitors. I'm not entirely sure I understand what (3) is or why it's a separate page.
In general, though, you should get these under control, as it sounds like every advert basically has 4 different URLs. This could dilute your ranking ability and even cause Panda problems.
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks. One question, would it be best to take one of the urls for each prob point to be the target or or use the canonical on all?
Thanks
Steve
-
Hi Steve
I think implementing a canonical tag here is your best course of action, as you have rightly pointed out.
If you have different URL versions of the same page, like you might with the printer version of the pages, implementing the tag will stop Google from indexing any variants of the URL. Only one URL will be indexed and the dynamic URLs will eventually be deindexed. That should solve that particular duplicate content problem.
If you have two different pages that need to exist, but they have similar content, you will need to add a canonical tag to one and add the same canonical tag to the other. By that I mean the second, duplicate page needs to have its tag's URL point to the original. Again, that should prevent it from being indexed.
More information on canonicalisation can be found with the SEOMoz canonical guide.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Rel=canonical or 301 to pass on page authority/juice
I have a large body of product support documentation and there are similar pages for each of versions of the product, with minor changes as the product changes. The two oldest versions of this documentation get the best ranking and are powering Google snippets--however, this content is out of date. The team responsible for the support documentation wants current pages to rank higher. I suggested 301 redirects but they want to maintain the old page content for clients still using the older version of the product. Is there a way to move a page's power to a more updated version of the page, but without wiping out the old content? Considering recommending canonical tags, but I'm not sure this will get me all the way there either as there are some differences between pages, especially as the product has changed over time. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | rachelholdgrafer0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Canonical URL Tag: Confusing Use Case
We have a webpage that changes content each evening at mid-night -- let's call this page URL /foo. This allows a user to bookmark URL /foo and obtain new content each day. In our case, the content on URL /foo for a given day is the same content that exists on another URL on our website. Let's say the content for November 5th is URL /nov05, November 6th is /nov06 and so on. This means on November 5th, there are two pages on the website that have almost identical content -- namely /foo and /nov05. This is likely a duplication of content violation in the view of some search engines. Is the Canonical URL Tag designed to be used in this situation? The page /nov05 is the permanent page containing the content for the day on the website. This means page /nov05 should have a Canonical Tag that points to itself and /foo should have a Canonical Tag that points to /nov05. Correct? Now here is my problem. The page at URL /foo is the fourth highest page authority on our 2,000+ page website. URL /foo is a key part of the marketing strategy for the website. It has the second largest number of External Links second only to our home page. I must tell you that I'm concerned about using a Cononical URL Tag that points away from the URL /foo to a permanent page on the website like /nov05. I can think of a lot of things negative things that could happen to the rankings of the page by making a change like this and I am not sure what we would gain. Right now /foo has a Canonical URL Tag that points to itself. Does anyone believe we should change this? If so, to what and why? Thanks for helping me think this through! Greg
Technical SEO | | GregSims0 -
Will the Google juice flow after a redirect?
If someone links to this page : http://abonnes.hospimedia.fr/articles/20131004-plfss-2014-les-federations-de-l-aide-a Will the Google juice flow to this page? http://www.hospimedia.fr/actualite/articles/20131010-gestion-des-risques-un-projet-de-decret-vient
Technical SEO | | Syl200 -
Incorrect rel canonical , impacts ?
Incorrect use of canonical code.. and why have they used the strange code surrounding it. Hi there seo guys, I need some help.. a site I am working on has used the rel canonical tag incorrectly. they have used the code on the cannon page not on the duplicate pages.. there is also some other strange code with it. I will show and hide the url.. However I wanted to know if this would stop google bots crawling this page correctly as they dont seem to rank very well either.. here is the code:
Technical SEO | | ibusmedia0 -
Is the seomoz on-page factor :Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical working properly?
I have a word press site with a rel canonical plug in. The rel="canonical" href= is there and the url in there works and goes to the actual page.So why does the seomoz keep giving the warning: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Technical SEO | | CurtCarroll0 -
How long to reverse the benefits/problems of a rel=canonical
If this wasn't so serious an issue it would be funny.... Long store cut short, a client had a penalty on their website so they decided to stop using the .com and use the .co.uk instead. They got the .com removed from Google using webmaster tools (it had to be as it was ranking for a trade mark they didn't own and there are legal arguments about it) They launched a brand new website and placed it on both domains with all seo being done on the .co.uk. The web developer was then meant to put the rel=canonical on the .com pointing to the .co.uk (maybe not needed at all thinking about it, if they had deindexed the site anyway). However he managed to rel=canonical from the good .co.,uk to the ,com domain! Maybe I should have noticed it earlier but you shouldn't have to double check others' work! I noticed it today after a good 6 weeks or so. We are having a nightmare to rank the .co.uk for terms which should be pretty easy to rank for given it's a decent domain. Would people say that the rel=canonical back to the .com has harmed the co.uk and is harming with while the tag remains in place? I'm off the opinion that it's basically telling google that the co.uk domain is a copy of the .com so go rank that instead. If so, how quickly after removing this tag would people expect any issues caused by it's placement to vanish? Thanks for any views on this. I've now the fun job of double checking all the coding done by that web developer on other sites!
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Canonical on ecommerce site
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0