Google not reading my canonical links
-
Hi All,
New to SEOmoz but so far love it. My reports list tons of duplicate links and webmaster tools does as well. In fact it just updated last night and added several hundred more. I have the canonical tag on my products. Here is a product example page:
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/funny-christmas-cards/KX296a.html
Thank you for the help.
Matt
-
It does thanks.
-
I would suggest you use a crawler like Screaming Frog to do an audit of your site and to make sure there are no coding issues. As for what Google is telling you, you can again using GWT to extract the duplicates it's reporting and crawl and use the Exact fuction in Excel to ensure the duplicates are indeed the same URL and when they are not, look at them and find out what the problem is. My guess is that you won't find a lot of issues and it's just the way GWT reports right now and that it does not factor in that URLA and URLB are canonicaled to URLB and therefore it should not say URLA and URLB are duplicate.
I hope this helps.
-
Thanks Nakul. What got me worried is that I had a coding error in my canonical tag and i fixed it about a month ago. Was waiting for GWT to flush out the duplicates and then today they essentially doubled. What do you make of this?
-
It's working exactly it should:
Go to Google and search for these:
cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/14131b.html
cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/featured/14131b.html
cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.htmlEach of those 3 times, I see:
This is Google's cache of http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.html.
Which means the correct URL / canonical is being crawled.
There's nothing you need to do. If possible, the only thing you can do is to try and ensure your CMS always generates the canonical version, not the others. But if you can'd do that, that's fine, that's what the canonical tag is for.
You are good. No need to worry. Your canonical tags are being read correct by Googlebot.
At some point, GWT and and SEOMoz will update to factor canonicals in their reporting of Duplicate Titles, Meta etc.
-
Thanks for the reply. Here are some more
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/40016.html http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/40016.html
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/14131b.html
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/featured/14131b.html
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.html -
What are some other duplicate URls for this product ? I see the correct/canonical version of this page is indeeded indexed and cached in Google.
This is Google's cache of http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/funny-christmas-cards/KX296a.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on May 8, 2013 23:17:24 GMT.
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
-
Pandora in Google Analytics
Hi Mozers, in Google Analytics our ads are registering a 10 second page duration and a 90% bounce rate, which is pretty atrocious. My questions are: Organic page duration is 3:15 minutes, and Social + Referral are similar. Yet Pandora is bringing the average time on site way down, to less than a minute. Will those paid ad metrics be factored to the User Behavior and therefore negative affect our overall rankings? In other words does Google now see our page duration as less than a minute? The Pandora rep says that Google Analytics and Pandora have "systemic issues" such that GA is very inaccurate with Pandora metrics. I find that difficult to believe. Any insights here? Thanks all! Jane
Reporting & Analytics | | CalamityJane770 -
How would I create this type of report in Google Analytics?
I work for an e-commerce site. I would like to run a weekly report to see what every category pages increase and decrease for pageviews would be. How would I do that?
Reporting & Analytics | | EcommerceSite0 -
Alternative to Google Analytics
Hey Everyone, My company has just changed the order processing software we are using and it's causing some issues with Google Analytics conversion funnel tracking. Specifically, there is one point in the funnel where making certain selections (which about half the people do) causes the page to reload. Also, on the login/register page, if they miss a field, the software tells them missed the field, but loads a new page which has a different URL which is not a part of the funnel when a mistake like that isn't made. All of this is causing Google Analytics to report people as leaving the conversion funnel when they really haven't. About a third of the traffic is being shown as exiting the funnel with the exit URL being the exact same URL as the step they are supposedly exiting from (example: the visitor enters on page1, moves to page2, Google is showing that they exit on page2 and go to...page2. Does anyone have any suggestions of how to deal with this in Google Analytics? If not, do you have a recommendation of an alternative analytics program which can deal with the situations mentioned above? PS - Changing the way the checkout software works does not appear to be a viable option. Kurt Steinbrueck
Reporting & Analytics | | Kurt_Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com1 -
Link from Itunes
Does somebody know why links from Itunes are not visible in Seomoz/ Majestic. While the content is indexed by Google. (even if no-follow, I dont see the link). I hoped that building an app for one of my sites, is they ideal linkbait strategy for my EMD domain 🙂 Especially when apple is linking to my website from I tunes 🙂
Reporting & Analytics | | remkoallertz0 -
Setting up goals in Google Analytics
Hello! This question is seems so obvious that I'm also ashamed to ask... almost. If the goal of a website is to have a visitor complete a contact form, when setting up the Goal in Google Analytics (as a "URL destination") the URL of choice would be the form's thank you page, correct? Because that's the page that proves the visitor completed the task we want them the achieve. Right? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | SmileMoreSEO
Erik0 -
What is s.ytimg.com in google analytics?
My clients GA reports 273 visits from s.ytimg.com. I go to the site, it doesn't exist. I googled it, there were some code with s.ytimg.com in it, but nothing I could understand. Anybody have an idea where this comes from?
Reporting & Analytics | | endlessrange0 -
Track image searches on google analytics
How can i track image searches on google analytics? To filter the refferers by image.google or /imgres does not work in new google analytics (and brings an impossibly small number on old GA). also, this would not cover local google image refferers, that don't come from image.google.com. anyone knows how to find image search sources? i haven't found anything helpful in google's documentation or forums. thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | zeepartner0 -
Custom GA tracking and link value
Hi I'm working on a real estate agents web site which has a lots of links coming from paid listings in real estate linstings sites (this in France so I'm not sure examples will mean anything but basically the agents have 900 house listings in each site and each listing has a backlink) In analytics these are classified as referals and that's fine for the moment But because sites provide different types of links, we are considering tagging all paid links with analytics utm codes. Mainly to learn which ads are actually providing qualified traffic (providing contacts). I'm guessing that currently these links, there are thousands, bring seo value to my client's web site and are not considered as paid links. Will adding the analytics codes to these links cause a loss of their value by clearly indicating to Google that we paid for them? What's the current thinking on this? I'm tempted not to be worried about being honest about the origin of these links but I'm worried that there is a real danger of loosing current ranking Any arguments FOR tagging paid links ? Thanks for you help Neil
Reporting & Analytics | | NeilInFrance0