Rel="canonical" again
-
Hello everyone,
I should rel="canonical" my 2 languages website /en urls to the original version without /en. Can I do this from the header.php? Should I rel="canonical" each /en page (eg. en/contatti, en/pagina) separately or can I do all from the general before the website title?
Thanks if someone can help.
-
So, if I understood, my code to have in the header.php of the website should be:
hope im right :)
-
NetLogiQ Thank you.
This answer solves a lot of tricks i had in my head
Thank you very much, I will better study the link you sent, and try to implement on my website. Footers etc. are not translated, so they remain in the original language.. But while reading, I think the solution can fit to my problem.
Thanks again!
Eugenio
-
Hi,
As I see it, you don't need to use a rel="Canonical" because your pages are not duplicates. You have content in italian and translated content in English.
The only thing you need to do is add a rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
This is what Google recommends in case your website is fully translated.
Some example scenarios where
rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
is recommended: For example, you have both German and English versions of each page. Here is how you implement it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en1. Add a HTML link in the header - section for example:
2. HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL: Link: <http: www.yourwebsite.eg="" en="">; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en".</http:>
-
hello james
Thanks for reply. I have original webpages in Italian. Translated webpages are in English. I use a plugin for wordpress, that allows me to translate the whole page (title, etc.) except the url, which will only be different because of the /en before the original page name (in italian, eg /en/contatti)
Widgets, footers etc. are still in Italian, even with translated pages.
I also thought about changing permalinks to be %postname%, so that url may adapt to title (? I think). But Im afraid this website wide urls change will affect my current rankings.
Any suggestion?
-
This is a response to both questions. Rel = canonical will give in this case the English page the authority, that should be the page that ranks well.
The main issue here is if the whole page is translated don't use a canonical tag, if the content stays in English and the Navigation/footer is changed use canonical tag to the English page as this would verge on duplicate content.
-
in fact, now that im thinking:
will not canonical confuse google if trying to rank also for the other language?
What will appear? this is duplicate in a sense, but is complete different content in the other sense.
Please correct me if im wrong..
-
this is what google replied to the same question, not very explicit at all!
"Canonical was not created to say that a language is another language, but that a duplicate page is just a variation and not the original page"
Im lost again
but i also now think that rel canonical is the solution..
-
Just to add in here and simplify the process, Wordpress has a built in function to return the current post/page URL. Make use of 'get_permalink()', with some simply string manipulation you would be able to output the correct canonical tag to your page.
Edit: My PHP is a little rusty at times, but the following should sort you out:
//Check if the page you're on is a single post. If so run below.
if ( is_single() ) {
$url = get_permalink();
$canonical = str_replace('/en', '', $url);echo '';
};
?>As mentioned above, put this into your header.php file (in the template directory), where you would like the canonical tag to appear.
-
He isn't trying to redirect he does want both pages.
Also canonical sitewide is problematic unless you add a customized conditional at the PHP level. He has a wordpress site and can't edit the raw HTML of every page so he needs to have a PHP string at the global level which changes based on page variables.
-
Hello,
1. Do not add a canonical sitewide tag - here is a case study on why http://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization Long story short - he deindexed 57% of his website.
2. You could 301 redirect all the pages, instead of adding a rel canonical. If your /en version is a duplicate of the original version, then you could simply add a code that redirects each page to the relevant version, like this: RedirectMatch 301 ^/en/(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.en/$1
You can use that solution in the case where you have a website called www.mywebsite.com that has a www.mywebsite.com/en version for a lot of links if not all, and those are the ones indexed in Google. You just add that code into htaccess. So just replace mywebsite with your website.
-
I don't want to post the same answer as I did to your previous question but perhaps there was further clarification that you needed, that I missed!
Put a conditional in the header. Since you are using a wordpress platform you can't go in and manually edit each pages canonical anyway. Using the page if function and a variable you would be able to assign each one it's own rel= from a central head file anyway.
In an ideal situation you'd do each page manually but because of your CMS you need to do a work around
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
-
Where does rel=canonical go? One file that manages sort order, view, filters, etc...
Where do I put the rel=canonical when the search.cfm (using URL re-write) page is the one and only page, just using url parameters to control sort, filter, view, etc. Do I just put the rel=canonical at the top of the search.cfm page? The duplicate content issues I am getting are: https://www.domain.com/tx/austin/ https://www.domain.com/tx/austin/?d=25&h=&s=r&t=&v=l&a= Just want to be clear since Moz Pro is picking up both URL's but it's only really one file, search.cfm Thanks in advance for your help.
Technical SEO | | ErnieB0 -
"Moz encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" Error
I have been receiving this error for a while: "Moz encountered an error on one or more pages on your site" It's a Multi-Lingual Wordpress website, the robots.txt is set to allow crawlers on all links and I have followed the same process for other website I've done yet I'm receiving this error for this site.
Technical SEO | | JustinZimri0 -
"Url blocked by robots.txt." on my Video Sitemap
I'm getting a warning about "Url blocked by robots.txt." on my video sitemap - but just for youtube videos? Has anyone else encountered this issue, and how did you fix it if so?! Thanks, J
Technical SEO | | Critical_Mass0 -
Authorship Markup worth it for "invisible" authors
Greetings everyone! Background I help run multiple continuing education sites for Allied Health professionals. Our editors do a great job of getting some of the best authors in their respective fields to come onto the site and present webinars and we publish articles around those presentations. I would love to be able to use the rel=author tag on these sites as the authors we use help to improve our credibility when a user is on the site and I would like to take advantage of this in the SERPs. The issue is that while most of these authors are leaders in their respective fields and have published in many academic publications, they are not on Facebook or Twitter, let alone Google+. Also, they are probably not interested in setting up a G+ profile. They are "famous" and well published within their fields, yet they are somewhat "invisible" on the web. We are looking to implement author bios on our site and then could use the rel=author tag internally so that seems like a good first step. The question is then around linking out with rel=me to any profiles (FB, Twitter, G+) The issue is that, as I mentioned above, the online profiles are pretty scarce. Question / Discussion Is it worth it to setup all the authorship markup to internal bios on a site when many of the authors are "invisible" on G+, twitter, FB, etc. and so I will be limited in how I can link rel=me to those profiles. If the Google+ profile is not available for an author, what do you prefer to link to. Would you say FB over Twitter as FB has more users, or if a user has both profiles, but uses twitter more often, would you link to the Twitter profile instead? Many of these authors work at the university and have a bio page on the university website, would it be working linking to that profile? How do you judge the "best" place to link to if there is no Google+ profile. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CleverPhD0 -
Rel="author" showing old image
I'm using http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to test my rel="author" tag which was successful, but I noticed I wanted to change my image in Google+ as it is not what I want. I changed my image in Google+, it's been over 14 hours now and still not showing the new picture using the RichSnippets tool. I know Google can take a couple weeks at least to show changes in search results, but this RichSnippet tool I thought was immeidate. Am I missing something here or am I just impatient? I want my new photo to show.
Technical SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
Why is the ideal rel canonical URL structure?
I currently have the rel canonical point to wepay.com/donations/123456. Is it worth the effort making it point to wepay.com/donations/donation-name-123456? I would also need to track histories if users change the vanity URL with this new structure.
Technical SEO | | wepayinc0 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Does 301 redirect pass "freshness?"
Greetings! I work for an online retailer, and we recently launched a voting tool that allows customers to voice their opinion whether or not we should carry a new item. It's been a huge success and we've been generating thousands of comments. As a result, it's helped our SEO, and our products are showing up on the first page for some keywords without having any external links pointing to these pages. Our plan is to sell a product if it does well during the voting period. Unfortunately, we're not able to process the sale on the voting page, and need to redirect users to another page on our site. I understand that a 301 redirect transfers "linkjuice" to the new destination URL. But does it also transfer "freshness?" I ask because our new landing pages will not be updated as frequently as the voting pages. Example of our Voting Page:
Technical SEO | | znotes
http://www.uncommongoods.com/voting/product/50012/infant-fortune-cookie-booties Example of Redirected Item Page (where sale can be processed):
http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/baby-tube-socks-set-of-4 Any help/comments would be appreciated. Thank you!0