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.
Should my canonical tags point to the category page or the filter result page?
-
Hi Moz,
I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com.
Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com?
I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order.
What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site?
Thanks for reading!
-
Hi Daniel,
You've gotten some good responses to your question. Do you have any additional questions or comments you would like to add?
-
I agree, that's a great approach. I think you mean Javascript, not Java though (that's a different language). The only thing that might make this approach a challenge would be if you had so much product data before filtering that it caused a performance problem, i.e. let's say you had 50 pages of results...if you filter server-side, you're only sending down 1 page of results, whereas if you're filtering with client-side Javascript, you've got to send all 50 pages down and then filter it in the browser.
-
Hi Daniel,
Another option may be use java on your filter page so that however customers filter the product, the URL will remain the same with extra parameters in the URL to filter out the products. I find this the best way as you have the same URL for all sort of customization/filter and able to avoid duplicate content.
For example: Macys
-
Hi Daniel,
You're going to have to walk a fine line between having a page for every possible combination of filtered results that a user might search for AND appearing to have a ton of pages that are really almost identical....and suffering the wrath of Panda upon seeing what it thinks is duplicate content.
The easy way out is to have 1 page for each category, and no matter what filters are applied, rel=canonical to that category. Dupe content problem solved.
So why isn't this the ideal solution?
#1 You may be missing out on targeting combinations of categories and filters that users will commonly search for. Let's say you were selling clothing, and a category was shirts, and you had a filter for men/women/boys/girls. By making all shirts list pages rel=canonical to the overall shirts list page (with no filters), you'd be missing an opportunity to target "boys shirts".
#2 You may be missing opportunities to pour more link juice to the individual product pages. It's unclear (to me, anyway) whether Google adds the link juice from all pages rel=canonical'ed to a page, or whether Google simply treats rel=canonical as "oh ya, I've already seen & dealt with this page". Certainly in my testing I've seen places where pages rel=canonical'ed to another page actually still show up in the search results, so I'd say rel=canonical isn't as solid as a 301.
So what do you do? I'd recommend a mix. Figure out what combinations you think you can get search traffic from, and find a way to break down the complete set of combinations of filters and categories to target those, and to rel=canonical every page to one of your targeted pages.
It's entirely possible (likely, even) that you'll end up with a mix. For instance, going back to my earlier example, let's say you had another filter that was, let's say, price range. You might want to target "boys shirts", but not "boys shirts under $20". So, while "boys" was a filter value, and "under $20" was a filter value, you might rel=canonical all pages in the category "boys" with a filter value of "shirts" to your page that has just that category and that 1 filter set, regardless of setting of the price filter.
Clear as monkey poop?
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 'Jump link'/'Anchor tag' urls rank in Google for keywords?
E.g. www.website.com/page/#keyword-anchor-text Where the part after the # is a section of the page you can jump to, and the title of that section is a secondary keyword you want the page to rank for?
Algorithm Updates | | rwat0 -
If my article is reposted on another blog, using re=canonical, does that count as a link back?
Hey all! My company blog is interested in letting another blog repost our article. We would ask them to use "re-canonical" in the mark-up to avoid Google digging through "duplicate" info out there. I was wondering, if the other site does use the "re=canonical", will that appear as a backlink or no? I understand that metrics will flow back to my original URL and not the canonical one, but I am wondering if the repost will additionally show as a backlink. Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | cmguidry0 -
Dates appear before home page description in the SERPs- HUGE drop in rankings
We have been on the first page of Google for a number of years for search terms including 'SEO Agency', 'SEO Agency London' etc. A few months ago we made some changes to the design of the home page (added a blog feed), and made changes to the website sitemap. Two days ago (two months after last site changes were made) we dropped subsantially in the SERPs for all home page keywords. Where we are found, a date appears before the description in the SERPs, dating February 2012 (which is when we launched the original website). The site has been through a revamp since then, yet it still shows 2012. This has been followed by a few additional strange things, including the sitelinks that Google is choosing to show (which including author bio pages showing in homepage site links), and googling our brand name no longer brings up sitelinks in the SERPs. The problem only affects the home page. All other pages are performing as standard. When Penguin 4.0 came out we saw a noted improvement in our SERP performance, and our backlinks are good and quality, largely from PR efforts. Of course, I would be interested in additional pairs of eyes on the back links to see if anyone thinks that I have missed anything! We have 3 of our senior SEOs working on trying to figure out what is going on and how to resolve it, but I would be very interested if anyone has any thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | GoUp3 -
US domain pages showing up in Google UK SERP
Hi, Our website which was predominantly for UK market was setup with a .com extension and only two years ago other domains were added - US (.us) , IE (.ie), EU (.eu) & AU (.com.au) Last year in July, we noticed that few .us domain urls were showing up in UK SERPs and we realized the sitemap for .us site was incorrectly referring to UK (.com) so we corrected that and the .us domain urls stopped appearing in the SERP. Not sure if this actually fixed the issue or was such coincidental. However in last couple of weeks more than 3 .us domain urls are showing for each brand search made on Google UK and sometimes it replaces the .com results all together. I have double checked the PA for US pages, they are far below the UK ones. Has anyone noticed similar behaviour &/or could anyone please help me troubleshoot this issue? Thanks in advance, R
Algorithm Updates | | RaksG0 -
How to find which keywords bring traffic to a particular page on my website ?
I have been using Google Analytics and SEOMoz tools for a while now. I know which are my top landing pages and some of the keywords which bring me traffic. But I don't know which are the top searched keywords for my website as these are "not provided" by Google Analytics. More importantly, I want to know which keywords are directing traffic to a particular page on my website. Can anyone help ?
Algorithm Updates | | EricMoore0 -
Does google index non-public pages ie. members logged in page
hi, I was trying to locate resources on the topics regarding how much the google bot indexes in order to qualify a 'good' site on their engine. For example, our site has many pages that are associated with logged in users and not available to the public until they acquire a login username and password. Although those pages show up in google analytics, they should not be made public in the google index which is what happens. In light of Google trying to qualify a site according to how 'engaged' a user is on the site, I would feel that the activities on those member pages are very important. Can anyone offer suggestions on how Google treats those pages since we are planning to do further SEO optimization of those pages. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | jumpdates0 -
Keyword density and meta tags
Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages. On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags. So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Is using WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) ok for On-Page SEO?
Hi Mozzers, I'm investigating multilingual site setup and translating content for a small website for 15-20 pages and came accross WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) which looks like it could help, but I am curious as to whether it has any major international SEO limitations before trialing/buying. It seems to allow the option to automatically setup language folder structures as www.domain.com/it/ or www.domain.com/es/ etc which is great and seems to offer easy way of linking out to translators (for extra fee), which could be convenient. However what about the on-page optimization - url names, title tags and other onpage elements - I wonder if anyone has any experiences with using this plugin or any alternatives for it. Hoping for your valued advice!
Algorithm Updates | | emerald0