Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
-
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
-
I would just title them according to their view type. Try to put your most informative words as close to the front as possible so that it's easy to read in browser tabs, for example: Red Widgets, All Widgets, <$25 Widgets... etc. Meta description could probably be a repeat of the title tag. Make the title as UX friendly as possible.
-
- What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
Yes, I would not put them in the sitemap. Main goal of a sitemap is to make it easier for bots to discover the different pages of the site. The pages that have a canonical url pointing to another page don't really need this, as you don't want the search engines to index them anyway.
-
Since my preference is always to have people land on the page with thumbnails that is what I was thinking but wanted to double check. Thank you.
-
Based on how you're describing it, I'd leave them out of the sitemap.
-
These pages will be almost identical. They are category pages for ecommerce and the only difference is it will display all items and there will be no thumbnails. It sounds like you are saying not to put them in the sitemap in this instance?
-
They are category pages for an ecommerce site. Currently we list the items 25 to a page with a thumbnail. The second view will be all of the items in a basic list view with no thumbnails. We have some categories with several hundred items and our users have requested a way to see them all on one page.
-
Hi,
Agree with the arguments of Ryan on the whether or not to put the canonical.
However, if you decide that these pages are almost identical, and that you will use a canonical, it has no use to put all the variations of these pages in the sitemap. However, you should add the canonical version to the sitemap.
It's not a big problem if these pages are in the sitemap, you'll just notice it webmaster tools a low % of indexed pages for this sitemap.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Are the different views going to be substantially different pages or a reordering of products seen throughout each view? If the latter is the case I wouldn't use rel="canonical" for each view. If the pages are substantially different, like one is just displaying widgets, while the other is displaying widget maintenance tools, the having each of those pages as categorical sections to your store is worth it and worth being in the sitemap.
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
-
Canonicals for Splitting up large pagination pages
Hi there, Our dev team are looking at speeding up load times and making pages easier to browse by splitting up our pagination pages to 10 items per page rather than 1000s (exact number to be determined) - sounds like a great idea, but we're little concerned about the canonicals on this one. at the moment we rel canonical (self) and prev and next. so b is rel b, prev a and next c - for each letter continued. Now the url structure will be a1, a(n+), b1, b(n+), c1, c(n+). Should we keep the canonicals to loop through the whole new structure or should we loop each letter within itself? Either b1 rel b1, prev a(n+), next b2 - even though they're not strictly continuing the sequence. Or a1 rel a1, next a2. a2 rel a2, prev a1, next a3 | b1 rel b1, next b2, b2 rel b2, prev b1, next b3 etc. Would love to hear your points of view, hope that all made sense 🙂 I'm leaning towards the first one even though it's not continuing the letter sequence, but because it's looping the alphabetically which is currently working for us already. This is an example of the page we're hoping to split up: https://www.world-airport-codes.com/alphabetical/airport-name/b.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Syntax: 'canonical' vs "canonical" (Apostrophes or Quotes) does it matter?
I have been working on a site and through all the tools (Screaming Frog & Moz Bar) I've used it recognizes the canonical, but does Google? This is the only site I've worked on that has apostrophes. rel='canonical' href='https://www.example.com'/> It's apostrophes vs quotes. Could this error in syntax be causing the canonical not to be recognized? rel="canonical"href="https://www.example.com"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ccox10 -
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?
Bit of a weird case, but let me explain. We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dragonlawhq
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle). We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website). Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-page My understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.0 -
Putting "noindex" on a page that's in an iframe... what will that mean for the parent page?
If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage? Nothing? Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Philip-DiPatrizio0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
E Commerce product page canonical and indexing + URL parameters
Hi, I'm having some issues on the best way to handle site structure. The technical side of SEO isn't my strong point so I thought I'd ask the question before I make the decision. Two examples for you to look at. This is a new site http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital. By selecting another page to see more products you get this url string where/p/2. This page also has the canonical tag relating to this page and not the original page. Now if say for example I exclude this parameter (where) in webmaster tools will I be stopping Google indexing the products on the other pages where/p/2, 3, 4 etc. and the same if I make the canonical point to multimeters/digital/ instead of multimeters/digital/where/p/2 etc.? I have the same question applied to the older site http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html. which no longer has an canonical tags at all. The only real difference is Google is indexing http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html?page=2 but not http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital/where/p/2 Thanks for help in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0