Do canonical links effect local search rankings?
-
Hello,
I have just been doing some reading about canonical links. Part of my role at my family business is to look after all of the SEO and digital marketing for our business. I've been really pleased with the results i've managed to get as we currently rank in the top 3 in the organic search for all of the keywords we've been trying for.
My question is though, The Moz scan of my site came back and said we have some duplicate content. Although i've written every page completely from scratch I am sort of saying the same thing. We cover a few different areas for our business and we are in the service industry and i've always thought it was better to have a page dedicated to an area. We are a removals company and I would always type in for example 'Removal companies in London' I wouldn't just type in Removal Companies. It is very location specific which we've found out by asking our customers what they have/would type in.
Because of this, I was thinking perhaps this duplicate content is harming our sites SEO so I wondering, if i implemented a canonical link from all of my local area pages to my main House Removals page to say that there is where the content originated.Would it negatively affect the current ranking of my local pages (as it's pretty good) or would it actually increase the strength of our SEO and improve it?
Any help would be hugely appreciated
Cheers,
Robert
P.S i'm only self taught and i'm trying to learn as much as i can, please be kind.
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks so much for replying. So, if for example i had a main parent page called house removals which is effectively where we explain the business and how it works and what we do. Then just to appear in some more local searches we had pages coming off of it called 'house removals london', 'house removals birmingham' and 'house removals manchester'. The pages that are ranking are the location specific pages. If i was to put a canonical tag to link them back to the house removals page would we lose any of our ranking and would the house removals page effectively just take the place of the sub page?
I'm a little bit nervous to put canonical tags in because it's taken me a while to get us ranking so well.
Thanks for all the other advice I will definitely have a look through,
Cheers,
Robert
-
Hi there
I would put canonical tags on your site for the pages that you want ranking. I would also take a look at this content audit to make sure that your content is top notch and structurally correct.
From there, I would make sure that your site is country targeted in WMT and take a look at the following resources:
How to Have a Successful Local SEO Campaign in 2015 (Moz)
How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit (Moz)You can also take a look at citation services like Whitespark to help you.
Hope this all helps! Good luck!
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
-
Local News or National News backlinking?
Hello guys, I got an two offers, one from national newspaper and one from local newspaper (both online and printed editions, but here is online edition relevant.) to write about my company because we had some remarkable results in our niche. They would write a text about 2.000 words long and put a backlink to my website with the anchor text of my choice! The national newspaper has DA 49, whereas local newspaper has DA 39 but comes from the same city where we are based and writes just about the specific city and district in this city. Which one would you choose for your SEO?
Local Listings | | Suksinho0 -
Local Ranking Factors?
For Google, has anyone got a finger on how much of a factor the address type "service customers only at their location" versus "service customers at my business location AND customers location is" is as far as local search ranking especially for 3-pack results? (The former they hide the address the latter they show the street address) It seems to me the primary factors are obviously (a) proximity of user's location or location intent to the business location, then (b) natural organic ranking (age of business, domain authority, inbound links, quality content, relevance to the actual keywords searched for). But where does the address type rank amongst all the "secondary factors" like is business currently open, number of reviews and average rating, etc. etc. My guess would be reviews and average rating along with is business currently open would be third, and then address type would factor in - but for all I know the address type could be given much more importance than I am guessing?
Local Listings | | MrSem0 -
Website showing #1 in Local search, disappeared from Organic search - previously #1?
We manage a website santamaryflorist.com - a local Ohio florist. She is #1 ranked on Google Local results (and also on Yahoo and Bing). The site's homepage was previously #1 ranked for Organic but has disappeared from Organic ranking over the past few days. It shows occasionally as #1 in organic, like every few hours, but typically does not show. - Sub-pages are still showing on organic but not front page- Last week we had some issues with crawl errors but those seem to be resolved for several days (pages not available)_Why would the site be showing #1 in Local but only occasionally as the #1 result in organic but most of the time not showing in Organic results at all? _
Local Listings | | william20390 -
address on my websiteto help with local searches
If I put my address on my website, does it help that page to rank for local searches? especially if it's the same address that i am using for moz local and all my citations? I want my other pages to rank in different cities as well as i have a service that travels to all cities in my state. Will that address of my home town on my home page make google think that i don't service other cities? Thanks, Ron
Local Listings | | Ron100 -
Is eLocal a scam or legitimate directory for local SEO?
I just got an email from eLocal with information that is way farther off than any other email I have received from directories I know. I ran a search on them, and it definitely seems fishy. Plus, it's not showing up as a problem in my Moz Local account. However, I don't want an inconsistent listing if this is a legitimate site I should correct. Anyone have experience with them? What should I do? Thanks for the assistance, Ruben
Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
International customers for local business
Hi I have a vacation rental in France. My customers come from the UK/US, France, and Spain and as such i have three domains. www.domain.com (French) en.domain.com (English) es.domain.com (Spanish) I first set up a Google+ page which was tied to my French website and it's descriptive text and KW are in French. I subsequently set-up 2 more Google+ pages (English and Spanish, each with their respective domains and language specific KW) for the purpose of showing up in local searches in the UK and Spain, which is starting to working. I'm I going in the right direction? is this a crazy idea since they all have the same local address? Thank you for sharing insights regarding how to handle a local business with multilingual customers.
Local Listings | | pgcosson0 -
Address Format for Local SEO
Hi, Ive been reading how important it is to get the address of a business consistent and written in the right format to help with Local Search Engine Rankings. Is this correct? If this is the case, are there any online generators to help create this html in the right format to put into a webpage. Thank you.
Local Listings | | Ampweb0