Is there a limit to the number of duplicate pages pointing to a rel='canonical ' primary?
-
We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag.
We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong?
Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time.
A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these.
Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?)
Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up?
Thanks
-
I'll add this article by Rand that I came across too. I'm busy testing the solution presented in it:
https://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo
In summary, 404 all dead pages with a good custom 404 page so as to not waste crawl bandwidth. Then selectively 301 those dead pages that have accrued some good link value.
Thanks Donna/Tammy for pointing me in this direction..
-
In this scenario yes, a customized 404 page with a link to a few top level ( useful) links would be better served to both the user and to Google. From a strictly SEO standpoint, 100,000 redirects and or canonical tags would not benefit your SEO.
-
Thanks Donna, good points..
We return a hard 404, so it's treated correctly by google. We are just looking at this from a SEO point of view now to see if there's any way to reclaim this lost link juice.
Your point about looking at the value of those incoming links is a good one. I suppose it's not worth making google crawl 100,000 more pages for the sake of a few links. We've just starting seeing these pop up in Moz Analytics as link opportunities, and we can see them as 404's in site explorer too. There are a few hundred of these incoming links that point to a 404, so we feel this could have an impact.
I suppose we could selectively 301 any higher value links to the home page.. It will be an administrative nightmare, but doable..
How do others tackle this problem. Does everyone just hard 404 a page when that loses the link juice for incoming links to it..?
Thanks
-
Hi David,
When you say "we've been 404'ing them for years", does that mean you've created a custom 404 page that explains the situation to site visitors or does it mean you've been letting them naturally error and return the appropriate 404 (page not found) error to Google? It makes a difference. If the pages truly no longer exist and there is no equivalent replacement, you should be letting them naturally error (return a 404 return code) so as not to mislead Google's robots and site visitors.
Have you looked at the value of those incoming links? They may be low value anyway. There may be more valuable things you could be doing with your time and budget.
To answer your specific questions:
_Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?) _
Yes, if those pages (or valuable replacements) don't actually exist. You'd be wasting valuable crawl budget. This looks like it might be especially true in your case given the size of your site. Check out this article. I think you might find it very helpful. It's an explanation of soft 404 errors and what you should do about them.
Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up?
If the canonical tag is changed or removed, Google will find and reindex it next time it crawls your site (assuming you don't run out of crawl budget). You don't need to use WMT unless you're impatient and want to try to speed the process up.
-
Thanks Sandi, I did..
It's a great article and it answered many questions for me, but i couldn't really get clarity on my last two questions above..
-
Hey David
Check this MOZ Blog post about Rel=Canlonical appropriately named Rel=Confused?
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
-
'Results pages'
Hey there, I have a website that my client is update it every day with some 'results' for example - see attached image.
On-Page Optimization | | JohnPalmer
What is the best way to avoid 7 duplicate content pages every day? MgYlqFW.png0 -
ECommerce Duplicate content on product pages (eg delivery info, contact details etc)
Hi, Running a Magento site and wanted to check about duplicate page content. We have 1000+ product pages and it has been suggested to remove some of the "duplicated content" which displays on every product page and replace this with an image of the same text content. By this I am talking about content which is for promo/customer purposes and is displayed on every page. eg: "If you find our products cheaper elsewhere then please click below to get your price match...... etc", and a chunk of text for the "Delivery Tab Information" and "Contact Tab Information" on each and every product page. A SEO company has suggested to turn this content into images. Does anyone have thoughts on this please?
On-Page Optimization | | Ampweb0 -
Impact of number of outgoing links on Page Rank of an optimized page?
What is the current best practice on preferred number of outbound links on a page you are trying to rank with: According to online resources form a pure page rank perspective a high number of outbound follow links can have a negative impact not only on child pages but also the page itself
On-Page Optimization | | thomaspro
http://pr.efactory.de/e-outbound-links.shtml Other resources suggest that particularly placing high quality outbound links on a page (nofollow) increases the trust and authority of a page Are there any other elements to keep in mind? Is the best practice to avoid any follow links on a page you want to rank well in Google for? Thanks /T0 -
Canonical rel
I am having a few issues understanding the whole report card and canonical issue. I have a wordpress blog www.theseolab.com.au. When i created the blog i had setup http://theseolab.com.au and i thought that was my mistake. When i ran the on page report for www.theseolab.com.au . It said that my canonical was http://theseolab.com. So i changed it and my canonical points to http://www.theseolab.com.au. 5 days later i run the on page again and it still says that there are issues and it still shows that my website canonical is not pointing to the right link. Does it take time to update or am i missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | theseolab0 -
Google Doesn't Display A Right Page Title
For some reason Google Displays a wrong page title of some of my pages. E.g. page http://www.imoney.my/home-loan The title in the search reach results says "Home Loan - iMoney", but the one I've set up is <title></span><span class="webkit-html-tag">Housing Loan: Compare Mortgages of All Malaysian Banks @iMoney.my</span><span class="webkit-html-tag"></title> Even when I preview it on the preview tool, it shows the full title, but when I google - again the short one. Does anyone know what the reason for that is?
On-Page Optimization | | imoney0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
Duplicate Page Content Issues
How can I fix Duplicate Page Content Issues on my site : www.ifocalmedia.com. This is a WP site and the diagnostics shows I have 115 errors? I know this is damaging to my SEO campaign how do I clear these? Any help is very welcome.
On-Page Optimization | | shami0 -
Home page ranking dropped below internal pages
The index page for a site I manage has dropped significantly - internal pages rank above it. It's a new site, 2 months old but was ranking at 1st. Any suggestions as to how I can debug this?
On-Page Optimization | | OptioPublishing0