Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
-
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain.
We have set up different rel="alternative codes like:
The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com?
For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to:
Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html -
I'm honestly not completely clear on what the different URLs are for - I'd just add a note to keep the core difference between canonical and 301s in mind. A canonical tag only impacts Google, and eventually, search results. A 301 impacts all visitors (and moves them to the other page). A lot of people get hung up on the SEO side, but the two methods are very different for end-users.
As Tom said, if these variations have no user value, you could consolidate them altogether with 301s. I always hesitate to suggest it without in-depth knowledge of the site, though, because I've seen people run off and do something dangerous.
-
What's the purpose of the URL if there's not even any sorting or anything unique going on? If's a sorted URL (say by "size" smallest-largest for /little leage/ URL) it might be actually useful to develop some unique category content to let the page rank separately.
If the content is totally unique, I don't think you could really go wrong redirecting. To be safe, I'd probably rely on analytics to answer the question "what impact will redirection have?" For instance, is there a difference in conversion rate between the URLs. If you see a conversion bump from a more specific URL, you might want to sleuth out what's causing it.
-
Would you worry about it if the categories are somewhat useful for users to drill down the content?
For example:
/product.html
/aluminum-baseball-bats/product.html
/little-league-baseball-bats/product.htmlThey don't sell bats but it is the easiest way to describe it I guess. In this cause would you still 301 redirect the two longer urls to /product.html
-
Yes, providing that the /category1/ and /category2/ heirarchy doesn't help the user experience (e.g. product segmentation based on say, color and brand, which would be useful for users to drill down to).
I like 301s better because they are permanent, non-ambiguous, respected by all engines, and chiefly because they eliminate the possibilty of inlink dillution because the redirected URLs are never seeen.
-
Yeah, don't use rel=canonical for the same purpose as rel=alternate - the canonical tag will override the alternate/lang tag and may cause your alternate versions to rank incorrectly or not at all. It can be a bit unpredictable. If you only wanted one version to show up in search results, then rel=canonical would be ok, but rel=alternate is a softer signal to help Google rank the right page in the right situation. It's not perfect, but that's the intent.
As for multiple canonicals like what you described, that's essential like chaining 301-redirects. As much as possible, avoid it - you'll lose link equity, and Google may just not honor them in some cases. There's no hard/fast limit, and two levels may be ok in some cases, but I think it's just a recipe for trouble long-term. Fix the canonicals to be single-hop wherever possible.
-
Thanks that is what I was thinking, I just need to know more about if the bots will follow the canonical's past one level when pointing to a different domain and if so how many levels on the different sites.
-
Interesting idea, I might have to do that. Right now I have canonical elements on the .com
It is a magento store so it creates dirty duplicate content when the products are in different categories out of the box, for example magento creates the following product pages:
domain.com/store/productcategory1/product.html
domain.com/store/productcategory2/product.html
domain.com/store/product.htmlIn this case I have canonical elements pointing the categories to the main root domain.com/store/product.html
So you think it would be better to do a 301 redirect for the different product urls that are in subcategories?
-
Miles,
On your last question, I'm wondering if those two canonical tags are necessary? Are the /sub/ versions of those pages necessary for user experience? If not, I'd add a canonical element to the .com version, then redirect the /sub/product.html to /product.html. That would help you avoid splitting link authority.
-
Hey Miles,
The both are for different uses and may or may not be used in the same page depending on your situation.
If the content in the CA and COM versions is the same, then you should add a rel canonical + rel alternate, the rel alternate pointing to itself and the other version of it, and the canonical pointing to the one you consider definitive.
If the content isn't the same, then the rel canonical isn't needed (but suggested, pointing to itself in each lang/alternate), only the alternate should be in place.
You can read more on Dr. Pete's post here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Hope that 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
-
Can cross domain rel canonical point back and forth
My company was recently acquired by a much larger one with much stronger domain authority. Can we both use cross domain rel canonical for different keywords and on different pages than each other to help each other rank for non-competing keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cassie_Ransom0 -
Canonical page 1 and rel=next/prev
Hi! I'm checking a site that has something like a News section, where they publish some posts, quite similar to a blog.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite
They have a canonical url pointing to the page=1. I was thinking of implementing the rel=next/ prev and the view all page and set the view all page as the canonical. But, as this is not a category page of an ecommerce site, and it would has more than 100 posts inside in less than a year, It made me think that maybe the best solution would be the following Implementing rel=next/prev
Keep page 1 as the canonical version. I don't want to make the users wait for a such a big page to load (a view all with more than 100 elements would be too much, I think) What do you think about this solution? Thank you!0 -
Rel=“next” and rel=“prev” on category pages and galleries
Hi there, I am running an WordPress blog and i was looking a couple of days on the source code of the categories. From a SEO point of view would make sense to include into the header of the categories the rel=“next” and rel=“prev” tags ? Same question would be for the image galleries . Should i add the rel=“next” and rel=“prev” tags on the image galleries ? So for example if i upload 10 images to a gallery, the user will check the post and see the gallery. It will click on an image and will redirected on the attachment page of that displays that image > from where he can click next to see the next image or prev for the previous image. Therefore should i add the rel=“next” and rel=“prev” tags here too ? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MirceazetelSerafim1 -
Differences between "casas rusticas" and "casas rústicas"
Hi All, I've a client with this website: http://www.e-rustica.com/casas-rusticas It's a spanish realtor for special houses (rustic). We wanto it to be good posited as "casas rústicas" that it's the correct keyword and asl "casas rusticas" that it's like lot of people write it. Do you know if google see this two keywords as the same? Even we've done SEO for "casas rústicas" it's much better posited for "casas rusticas". Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbenzo_aficiona0 -
Canonical use when dynamically placing items on "all products" page
Hi all, We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html." However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings. We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages. Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue? Thanks, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Do links to PDF's on my site pass "link juice"?
Hi, I have recently started a project on one of my sites, working with a branch of the U.S. government, where I will be hosting and publishing some of their PDF documents for free for people to use. The great SEO side of this is that they link to my site. The thing is, they are linking directly to the PDF files themselves, not the page with the link to the PDF files. So my question is, does that give me any SEO benefit? While the PDF is hosted on my site, there are no links in it that would allow a spider to start from the PDF and crawl the rest of my site. So do I get any benefit from these great links? If not, does anybody have any suggestions on how I could get credit for them. Keep in mind that editing the PDF's are not allowed by the government. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Fetch as GoogleBot "Unreachable Page"
Hi, We are suddenly having an error "Unreachable Page" when any page of our site is accessed as Googlebot from webmaster tools. There are no DNS errors shown in "Crawl Errors". We have two web servers named web1 and web2 which are controlled by a software load balancer HAProxy. The same network configuration has been working for over a year now and never had any GoogleBot errors before 21st of this month. We tried to check if there could be any error in sitemap, .htaccess or robots.txt by excluding the loadbalancer and pointing DNS to web1 and web2 directly and googlebot was able to access the pages properly and there was no error. But when loadbalancer was made active again by pointing the DNS to it, the "unreachable page" started appearing again. This very same configuration has been working properly for over a year till 21st of this month. Website is properly accessible from browser and there are no DNS errors either as shown by "Crawl Errors". Can you guide me about how to diagnose the issue. I've tried all sorts of combinations, even removed the firewall but no success. Is there any way to get more details about error instead of just "Unreachable Page" error ? Regards, shaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shaz_lhr0 -
Can I use a "no index, follow" command in a robot.txt file for a certain parameter on a domain?
I have a site that produces thousands of pages via file uploads. These pages are then linked to by users for others to download what they have uploaded. Naturally, the client has blocked the parameter which precedes these pages in an attempt to keep them from being indexed. What they did not consider, was they these pages are attracting hundreds of thousands of links that are not passing any authority to the main domain because they're being blocked in robots.txt Can I allow google to follow, but NOT index these pages via a robots.txt file --- or would this have to be done on a page by page basis?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PapaRelevance0