Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Category page canonical tag
-
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice.
Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page.
There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example:
/range.html?p=2
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=priceIs it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag?
After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated.
Chris.
-
Thanks DP for the input!
-
It's tricky. Practically, I tend to agree with Tom - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Especially at small-to-medium scale (let's say hundreds of URLs, but not thousands), rel=canonical is probably going to do the job here.
Technically, CleverPhd is correct that paginated content may be better served by rel=prev/next, and Google isn't fond of you canonical'ing to page 1 of search results. Their other preferred method is to canonical to a "View All" page (and make that page/link available to visitors), if that page loads reasonably and isn't huge.
In practice, they don't seem to penalized anyone for a canonical to page 1, and I know some mega-site SEOs who use rel=prev/next and have been almost completely unable to tell if it works (based on how Google still indexes and ranks the content). I think the critical thing is to keep most of these pages out of the index and avoid the duplicates. If your approach is working for now, my gut says to leave it alone.
-
I would agree that use of the canonical tag is great, I would not say that it is the most optimal solution in this case as you have paginated results
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
The use of rel next prev would be more appropriate in that case. It has the advantage of also letting the link juice flow properly and it is what Google "expects" to see.
Now, if you wanted to be more conservative with this approach, you could add the meta noindex so that you also get all the other paginated pages out of the index, but this is an optional step.
One other thing to think about, if this is not a pagination issue, but this is more like a search result or resort of the same page, I would no follow links to those pages and noindex the resulting duplicates. You have to think about crawl efficiency and if you are having Google crawl a bunch of thin pages that you are trying to canonical to a parent page, you are wasting Google's time. Google will only spend so much time on a site spidering. Do you want it to waste time spidering a ton of pages that dont matter? Sure, the canonical would give Google all the right signals of what page goes where, but why would you want it to waste time doing that. You would rather Google spend time on your most important pages and spidering and reindexing those. Think about it, if you are going to ask a math savant to help you with your homework, are you going to have him/her spend time helping you with 1000 simple addition problems? No! You would go right to the more important/complex items.
http://searchengineland.com/how-i-think-crawl-budget-works-sort-of-59768
Anyway, hope this helps give you another perspective. Someone will probably say, well, this only matters on larger sites etc. I say no, it matters on all sites as you always want to have your best foot forward when the spiders come a crawling.
-
Hi Chris
First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing. It's working well - and here's why:
Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.
Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"
Now, why would you want to do this? Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).
Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.
Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.
Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages. That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs. This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.
But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job. Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"
So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well. Very well, in fact. If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.
So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!
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
-
No meta description on category page
Hi Moz is reporting no meta description on a wordpress category page like this one: http://www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk/category/uncategorized/ Can I add a meta description to a category? Best wishes. David.
On-Page Optimization | | WallerD0 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
Should we add our company's name in page title tag or not?
We have been adding our company (Townscript) name in all the page titles. For example, in an event page of Lucknow Conclave: www.townscript.com/lucknowconclave the page title is Lucknow Conclave | Alexis Society | Townscript I read somewhere that it's not necessary to put your company's name in the title tag. Is it right? Please help!
On-Page Optimization | | sanchitmalik0 -
Home page and category page target same keyword
Hi there, Several of our websites have a common problem - our main target keyword for the homepage is also the name of a product category we have within the website. There are seemingly two solutions to this problem, both of which not ideal: Do not target the keyword with the homepage. However, the homepage has the most authority and is our best shot at getting ranked for the main keyword. Reword and "de-optimise" the category page, so it doesn't target the keyword. This doesn't work well from UX point of view as the category needs to describe what it is and enable visitors to navigate to it. Anybody else gone through a similar conundrum? How did you end up going about it? Thanks Julian
On-Page Optimization | | tprg0 -
Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be
My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW1 -
H1 tag in the footer?
Quick question: I have been scouring SEOMoz.org along with webmaster forums looking for an answer, but we have a person who insists that the H1 tag be located in the Footer. I feel that is is fundamentally wrong because it is not the intent of the H1 tag, and I do not believe it is a best practice. That being said would we see what little value the H1 tag has disappear if we put it in the footer, would we be penalized, or am I being too vanilla by wanting to keep it in the Title position?
On-Page Optimization | | travelclickseo0 -
Wordpress: Should I NO INDEX Categories & Archives Pages?
I am new to SEOmoz & trying to work my way through the ca-trillion errors that have been found on my site, but for each one I want to ensure that I am helping rather than harming my site. The tool has (as a "notice") said that my category pages & Archives are NO-INDEX, is this how these pages should be dealt with? In addition, the crawler has also (as a "warning error) discovered that my categories, and Archives do not have a meta description..is this of great importance for non indexed pages of this type? Thanks so much to the SEOmoz forum members, you have so far been of invaluable help to me.
On-Page Optimization | | KMack2 -
Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?
As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags. I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag). Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20. From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold: 1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure? 2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | semantopic0