Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
-
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop.
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
-
Thanks so much! Really helpful!
-
Not exactly. Its not so much that the canonical "supersedes" an index, follow tag.... a canonical tag establishes equivalency while a NoIndex is more like a "does not equal." The Index, Follow is still there and being seen by bots as they crawl... in fact, if you had NoIndex on a page with a Canonical Tag, it may not even see the canonical at all since you told it to NoIndex the page. The Meta Robots Index tag comes first allowing the bots to crawl and index the page but then the canonical sets up equivalency to a separate page. So if your canonical tag is being respected, it doesn't wind up doing the same thing as a NoIndex (though it may seem that way) nor does it do the same thing as a 301 (though there are similarities in how equity is passed). Since a canonical establishes an equivalency, you'll find that the Canon Page will eventually take the place of the Canonicalized Page in search results because you're telling them the Canonicalized Page _is _the Canon Page & that the Canon page is the right version of both.
-
Thanks, Mike! So, just to clarify, for a particular URL, if we have Meta Robots set to "Index/Follow" and that same URL has a canonical tag, the canonical tag would supersede the robot command and the URL would not be indexed?
-
If a URL was indexed and has since had a canonical added to it pointing to another page, it will eventually disappear from results. Basically the pages gets consolidated with its canon page. If the bots choose to respect the canonical tag in that instance, all signals get passed to the canon page while still allowing the page and information to be accessible by human visitors. As such, there's no reason to keep the page in the index because you're telling the bots that another page is the correct page instead. This is not the same as NoIndexing a page but will eventually remove a page from the index much in the same way that a 301 will pass equity along to another page while eventually removing the redirected page from the index in favor of the page being redirected to.
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
-
I'm struggling to understand (and fix) why I'm getting a 404 error. The URL includes this "%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D" but I cannot find that anywhere in the referring URL. Does anyone know why please? Thanks
Can you help with how to fix this 404 error please? It appears that I have a redirect from one page to the other, although the referring page URL works, but it appears to be linking to another URL with this code at the end of the the URL - %5Bnull%20id=43484%5D that I'm struggling to find and fix. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Google indexes page elements
Hello We face this problem that Google indexes page elements from WordPress as single pages. How can we prevent these elements from being indexed separately and being displayed in the search results? For example this project: www.rovana.be When scrolling down the search results, there are a lot of elements that are indexed separately. When clicking on the link, this is wat we see (see attachements) Does anyone have experience with this way of indexing and how can we solve this problem? Thanks! LlAWG4w.png C7XDDYS.png gVroomx.png
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Site removed from Google Index
Hi mozers, Two months ago we published http://aquacion.com We registered it in the Google Webmaster tools and after a few day the website was in the index no problem. But now the webmaster tools tell us the URLs were manually removed. I've look everywhere in the webmaster tools in search for more clues but haven't found anything that would help me. I sent the acces to the client, who might have been stupid enough to remove his own site from the Google index, but now, even though I delete and add the sitemap again, the website won't show in Google SERPs. What's weird is that Google Webmaster Tools tells us all the page are indexed. I'm totally clueless here... Ps. : Added screenshots from Google Webmaster Tools. Update Turns out it was my mistake after all. When my client developped his website a few months ago, he published it, and I removed the website from the Google Index. When the website was finished I submited the sitemap, thinking it would void the removal request, but it don't. How to solve In webmaster tools, in the [Google Index => Remove URLs] page, you can reinclude pages there. tGib0
Technical SEO | | RichardPicard0 -
Single URL not indexed
Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Pages removed from Google index?
Hi All, I had around 2,300 pages in the google index until a week ago. The index removed a load and left me with 152 submitted, 152 indexed? I have just re-submitted my sitemap and will wait to see what happens. Any idea why it has done this? I have seen a drop in my rankings since. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TomLondon0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
How do we ensure our new dynamic site gets indexed?
Just wondering if you can point me in the right direction. We're building a 'dynamically generated' website, so basically, pages don’t technically exist until the visitor types in the URL (or clicks an on page link), the pages are then created on the fly for the visitor. The major concern I’ve got is that Google won’t be able to index the site, as the pages don't exist until they're 'visited', and to top it off, they're rendered in JSPX, which makes things tricky to ensure the bots can view the content We’re going to build/submit a sitemap.xml to signpost the site for Googlebot but are there any other options/resources/best practices Mozzers could recommend for ensuring our new dynamic website gets indexed?
Technical SEO | | Hutch_e0 -
Rel-canonical tag
Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?
Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan0