Canconical tag on site with multiple URL links but only one set of pages
-
We have a site www.mezfloor.com which has a number of Url's pointing at one site. As the url's have been in use for many years there are links from many sources include good old fashioned hard copy advertising. We have now decided that it would be better to try to start porting all sources to the .co.uk version and get that listing as the prime/master site.
A couple of days ago I went through and used canonical tags on all the pages thinking that would set the priority and that would also strengthen the page in terms of trust due to the reduced duplication. However when I went to scan the site in MOZ the warning that the page redirects came up and I am beginning to think that I need to remove all these canonical tags so that search engines do not get into a confused spiral where we loose the little page rank we have.
Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at.
-
Yes, it is good when there is a clear Google guideline to follow. I'm happy for your quick win!
-
Thanks
I am pleased I do not have to go through the whole site again and even more pleased as I have a number of other sites to work on.These could certainly do with a bit of a boost and this is a quick win.
-
So you want to put a canonical of www.b.co.uk/index.html on a page that can be reached via www.b.co.uk/index.html and you are worried that it will become a loop?
Don't worry. Google specifically thought about the possibility that people might use self-referential canonicals (SEO plugins do it all the time) and engineered it so that this does not cause a loop. (See Matt Cutts on the topic.)
I myself inherited some ugly urls for which I made nice user-friendly aliases and I tagged those pages with the friendly canonical. There were no problems and the pages started doing much better. (In my case it was not cross-domain, but cross-domain canonicals are supposedly supported and in fact I have succesfully used them in other situations.)
-
Hi thanks for the response
The issue is we have one set of pages on a server which is addressed through several different url's.
I never got involved in the server side of things so I do not know if that was by redirects at the route URL. Just maybe I am trying to add canonical links that just are not required.
If I have www.a.co.uk/index.html, www.a.com/index.html, www.b.co.uk/index.html and want them all to point to www.b.co.uk/index.html. As index.html is on the server once then my thought was that I should have a canonical link to that page from within that page with the www.b.co.uk/index.html as the route. This may be right or wrong but there is the risk that a spider stops when it gets to the link and goes to the start of the same page, again and again in a loop.
You are of course right that the Google bot should be OK with this but the Moz bot stopped in its tracks and asked if I wanted the page indexed so I had to do this manually.
Gut feel says I should remove the links for now but need to understand what we did server side. Gut feel maybe wrong and I would prefer to do the right thing!
-
Okay you lost me a little but let me see If I can help.
First off the canonical tag - Its fantastic for duplicate content (even across other sites) now so good if you don't have duplicate content.
301's - It's very similar to above can work well with duplicate content but not essential. Now you can 301 a few pages into one page so if a user types a URL in (or even has it as a bookmark etc.) the will land on the page you want. its normally a good idea to 301 into similar pages to you don't get users thinking they are going to buy (e.g.) a pair of boots and land on a page about t-shirts.
Google getting lost - Don't worry about Google getting lost, if a user can get around so can Google, plan plan and plan again if you plan it all out (you can even draw flow diagrams) so you know where its all going to and from until you are happy. You can also get someone who doesn't know your site to test it see if they get lost.
Hope that background helps a bit, you lost me here-
"Is there a way that I can redirect everything except the target URL without setting up a separate master site just for all the other pages to point at."
Why can't you redirect all your pages to the target URL ?
One helpful tool I recommend is screaming frog it can help you pick up redirects 404 etc.
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
-
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page is it issue with base url?
Hi All, Google Appending Blog URL inbetween my homepage and product page. Is it issue or base url or relative url? Can you pls guide me? Looking to both tiny url you will get my point what i am saying. Please help Thanks!
Technical SEO | | amu1230 -
When creating parent and child pages should key words be repeated in url and page title?
We are in the direct mail advertising business: PrintLabelAndMail.com Example: Parent:
Technical SEO | | JimDirectMailCoach
Postcard Direct Mail Children:
Postcard Mailings
Postcard Design
Postcard Samples
Postcard Pricing
Postcard Advantages should "postcard" be repeated in the URL and Page Title? and in this example should each of the 5 children link back directly to the parent or would it be better to "daisy chain" them using each as parent for the next?0 -
Duplicate pages in Google index despite canonical tag and URL Parameter in GWMT
Good morning Moz... This is a weird one. It seems to be a "bug" with Google, honest... We migrated our site www.three-clearance.co.uk to a Drupal platform over the new year. The old site used URL-based tracking for heat map purposes, so for instance www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html ..could be reached via www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=menu or www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=sidebar and so on. GWMT was told of the ref parameter and the canonical meta tag used to indicate our preference. As expected we encountered no duplicate content issues and everything was good. This is the chain of events: Site migrated to new platform following best practice, as far as I can attest to. Only known issue was that the verification for both google analytics (meta tag) and GWMT (HTML file) didn't transfer as expected so between relaunch on the 22nd Dec and the fix on 2nd Jan we have no GA data, and presumably there was a period where GWMT became unverified. URL structure and URIs were maintained 100% (which may be a problem, now) Yesterday I discovered 200-ish 'duplicate meta titles' and 'duplicate meta descriptions' in GWMT. Uh oh, thought I. Expand the report out and the duplicates are in fact ?ref= versions of the same root URL. Double uh oh, thought I. Run, not walk, to google and do some Fu: http://is.gd/yJ3U24 (9 versions of the same page, in the index, the only variation being the ?ref= URI) Checked BING and it has indexed each root URL once, as it should. Situation now: Site no longer uses ?ref= parameter, although of course there still exists some external backlinks that use it. This was intentional and happened when we migrated. I 'reset' the URL parameter in GWMT yesterday, given that there's no "delete" option. The "URLs monitored" count went from 900 to 0, but today is at over 1,000 (another wtf moment) I also resubmitted the XML sitemap and fetched 5 'hub' pages as Google, including the homepage and HTML site-map page. The ?ref= URls in the index have the disadvantage of actually working, given that we transferred the URL structure and of course the webserver just ignores the nonsense arguments and serves the page. So I assume Google assumes the pages still exist, and won't drop them from the index but will instead apply a dupe content penalty. Or maybe call us a spam farm. Who knows. Options that occurred to me (other than maybe making our canonical tags bold or locating a Google bug submission form 😄 ) include A) robots.txt-ing .?ref=. but to me this says "you can't see these pages", not "these pages don't exist", so isn't correct B) Hand-removing the URLs from the index through a page removal request per indexed URL C) Apply 301 to each indexed URL (hello BING dirty sitemap penalty) D) Post on SEOMoz because I genuinely can't understand this. Even if the gap in verification caused GWMT to forget that we had set ?ref= as a URL parameter, the parameter was no longer in use because the verification only went missing when we relaunched the site without this tracking. Google is seemingly 100% ignoring our canonical tags as well as the GWMT URL setting - I have no idea why and can't think of the best way to correct the situation. Do you? 🙂 Edited To Add: As of this morning the "edit/reset" buttons have disappeared from GWMT URL Parameters page, along with the option to add a new one. There's no messages explaining why and of course the Google help page doesn't mention disappearing buttons (it doesn't even explain what 'reset' does, or why there's no 'remove' option).
Technical SEO | | Tinhat0 -
New URL or Folder Off Existing Site
I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region. My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site. Parent: www.regionalsite.com New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/ Or www.themeurl.com My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact. Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3? Any advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
SEOMoz is indicating I have 40 pages with duplicate content, yet it doesn't list the URL's of the pages???
When I look at the Errors and Warnings on my Campaign Overview, I have a lot of "duplicate content" errors. When I view the errors/warnings SEOMoz indicates the number of pages with duplicate content, yet when I go to view them the subsequent page says no pages were found... Any ideas are greatly welcomed! Thanks Marty K.
Technical SEO | | MartinKlausmeier0 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0 -
Page that has no link is being crawled
http://www.povada.com/category/filters/metal:Silver/nstart/1/start/1.htm I have no idea how the above page was even found by google but it seems that it is being crawled and Im not sure where its being found from. Can anyone offer a solution?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30