Rel=canonical - Identical .com and .us Version of Site
-
We have a .us and a .com version of our site that we direct customers to based on location to servers. This is not changing for the foreseeable future.
We had restricted Google from crawling the .us version of the site and all was fine until I started to see the https version of the .us appearing in the SERPs for certain keywords we keep an eye on.
The .com still exists and is sometimes directly above or under the .us. It is occasionally a different page on the site with similar content to the query, or sometimes it just returns the exact same page for both the .com and the .us results. This has me worried about duplicate content issues.
The question(s): Should I just get the https version of the .us to not be crawled/indexed and leave it at that or should I work to get a rel=canonical set up for the entire .us to .com (making the .com the canonical version)? Are there any major pitfalls I should be aware of in regards to the rel=canonical across the entire domain (both the .us and .com are identical and these newly crawled/indexed .us pages rank pretty nicely sometimes)? Am I better off just correcting it so the .us is no longer crawled and indexed and leaving it at that?
Side question: Have any ecommerce guys noticed that Googlebot has started to crawl/index and serve up https version of your URLs in the SERPs even if the only way to get into those versions of the pages are to either append the https:// yourself to the URL or to go through a sign in or check out page? Is Google, in the wake of their https everywhere and potentially making it a ranking signal, forcing the check for the https of any given URL and choosing to index that?
I just can't figure out how it is even finding those URLs to index if it isn't seeing http://www.example.com and then adding the https:// itself and checking...
Help/insight on either point would be appreciated.
-
Rel=canonical is great for helping search engines serve the correct language or regional URL to searchers, but I'm not sure how it would work for two sites both purposed for the US (.us and .com).
What's the thought behind having two sites - is the .us site intended for Google US searches and .com the default for anything outside of the US? Are there language variations? What are the different "locations" you're referring to?
-
I would set sitewide canonicals from both versions to the .com site. I wouldn't block any pages since people might still stumble and link back to the .us version.
I'm not positive about google auto-checking https versions of websites without any direction but it could be plausible. I know a common way that Google finds https urls is by going to the "My Account" or "My Cart" page which is https, which then changes any relative URLs from http to https, go G re-crawls all of those. Maybe that's what is happening on your end?
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
-
Recently migrated to https version of volusion site. 301 redirect link chain question
I recently migrated to a https version of a volusion site. They have some type of internal 301 redirect method to accommodate for the entire site. I have also used the 301 redirect manager to redirect categories and pages which I have changed. The question is if I have changed a page internally in the redirect manager from say source. /bluewidget to say. target. /superbluewidget is it wiser or even possible to do it this way to reduce the redirect chain from 3 to 2 steps source. /bluewidget to. target https://www.example/superbluewidget can a relative link be targeted to a full url to reduce steps in a 301 redirect link chain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
Do you still loose 15% of value of inbound links when you redirect your site from http to https (so all inbound links to http are being redirected to https version)?
I know when you redesign your on website, you loose about 15% internally due to the 301 redirects (see moz article: https://moz.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand), but I'm wondering if that also applies to value of inbound links when you redirect your http://www.sitename.com to https://www.sitename.com. I appreciate your help!
Technical SEO | | JBMediaGroup0 -
Why put rel=canonical to the same url ?
Hi all. I've heard that it's good to put the link rel canonical in your header even when there is no other important or prefered version of that url. If you take a look at moz.com and see the code, you'll see that they put the <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://moz.com" /> ... pointing at the same url ! But if you go to http://moz.com/products/pricing for example, they have no canonical there ! WHY ? Thanks in advance !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?
Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning. So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https? Even simple information pages and blog posts? Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft1 -
Rel="canonical"
HI, I have site named www.cufflinksman.com related to Cufflinks. I have also install WordPress in sub domain blog.cufflinksman.com. I am getting issue of duplicate content a site and blog have same categories but content different. Now I would like to rel="canonical" blog categories to site categories. http://www.cufflinksman.com/shop-cufflinks-by-hobbies-interests-movies-superhero-cufflinks.html http://blog.cufflinksman.com/category/superhero-cufflinks-2/ Is possible and also have any problem with Google with this trick?
Technical SEO | | cufflinksman0 -
Ranking on google.com.au but not google.com
Hi there, we (www.refundfx.com.au) rank on google.com.au for some keywords that we target, but we do not rank at all on google.com, is that because we only use a .com.au domain and not a .com domain? We are an Australian company but our customers come from all over the world so we don't want to miss out on the google.com searches. Any help in this regard is appreciated. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RefundFX0 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0