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
-
Sitemap and canonical
In my sitemap I have two entries for my page ContactUs.asp ContactUs.asp?Lng=E ContactUs.asp?Lng=F What should I use in my page ContactUS.asp ? Is this correct?
Technical SEO | | CustomPuck0 -
Google Indexed a version of my site w/ MX record subdomain
We're doing a site audit and found "internal" links to a page in search console that appear to be from a subdomain of our site based on our MX record. We use Google Mail internally. The links ultimately redirect to our correct preferred subdomain "www", but I am concerned as to why this is happening and if it can have any negative SEO implications. Example of one of the links: Links aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com/about/solar-power-blog/daniel-sullivan/renewable-energy-and-electric-cars-are-not-political-footballs I did a site operator search, site:aspmx3.googlemail.com.sullivansolarpower.com on google and it returns several results.
Technical SEO | | SS.Digital0 -
What domain name do you think is better for SEO: sirocco-webdesign.com or sirocco-web-design.com?
Hello, I would appreciate it very much if you share with me your thoughts on what domain name I'd better pick out in terms of productive SEO: sirocco-webdesign.com or sirocco-web-design.com? I know hyphens are not good, but second domain looks better, I think.
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site? For example: The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post. In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this: ? What do you think? Thanks for help! Robert
Technical SEO | | Searchresult0 -
Canonical Question
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all. At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product. I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
Technical SEO | | Corpsemerch
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc.... I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc.... As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content. As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages? Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps. Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly. Any comments would be welcome..0 -
Does 301 redirecting a site multiple times keep the value of the original site?
Hi, All! If I 301 redirect site www.abc.com to www.def.com, it should pass (almost) all linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. What happens if I then redirect site www.def.com to www.ghi.com? Does the value of the original site pass indefinitely as long as you do the redirects correctly? Or does it start to be devalued at some point? If anyone's had experience redirecting a site more than once and they've seen reportable good/bad/neutral results, that would be very helpful. Thanks in advance! -Aviva B
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
Rel="canonical" for PFDs?
Hello there, We have a lot of PDFs that seem to end up on other websites. I was wondering if there was a way to make sure that our website gets the credit/authority as the original creator. Besides linking directly from the PDF copy to our pages, is anyone aware of strategy for letting Google know that we are the original publishers? I know search engines can index HTML versions of PDFs, so is there anyway to get them to index a rel="canonical" tag as well? Thoughts/Ideas?
Technical SEO | | Tektronix0 -
Confused about rel="canonical"
I'm receiving a duplicate content error in my reports for www.example.com and www.example.com/index.htm. Should I put the rel="canonical" on the index page and point it to www.example.com? And if I have other important pages where rel="canonical" is being suggested do I place the rel="canonical" on that page? For example if www.example/product is an important page would I place on that page?
Technical SEO | | BrandonC-2698870