Please take a look at my canonical tag - is it written right?
-
Hi there! I just changed the preferred domain settings from http://example.com to http://www.example.com and received a recommended action from Google: "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps."
Could you please let me know if "the new host" is equal to "canonical" and if I have to include this tag into every page of my website ?
Thank you!
-
Thank you!
-
Unfortunately I'm not much of a coder, so I won't be able to guide you on the htaccess code piece. Regarding the Search Console items though, the tool treats every site that is setup as its own entity, which is why you need a country and XML for each. An example of why they do this because you might have different profiles for http://www.example.com/us and http://www.example.com/ca where the subfolder specifies the country. If they recycled the same info from each profile setup, the /ca site would be set to U.S. instead of Canada.
-
Thank you, Sean!
-
Logan,
Thank you very much for your advise! I figured out that it is going to be much of work going from page to page and set their canonicals:) Maybe updating my .htaccess will work out? I am wondering if that (please see below) would be the right thing to put in there?
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]Also, when I added the property (http://www.example.com) yesterday and set it as preferred domain, I was suggested to change the target country and submit a sitemap file for both http://example.com and http://www.example.com. I don't quite understand why do they want me to do that if the country and the sitemap are obviously the same?
-
Kirupa,
The syntax of your canonical tag is correct. However, there are a couple things you should know before you continue:
1- When Google says "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps." it means they want to to update internal links and your XML sitemaps, so it's more involved than simply updating your canonical tag. Basically anywhere your URLs are referenced should be updated to reflect your new www-canonical URL structure.
2- You may have provided that one tag as an example, but DO NOT put that exact tag on every page of your site. Doing so would point search engines to the homepage of your site from any page they visit. Canonical tags are basically soft redirects that search engines follow, so when a bot sees a canonical tag on one page that points to another page, they leave and go to where the canonical is pointing them. Google will often de-index URLs that canonicalize to another URL, which I'm assuming you don't want
-
Hey Kirupa,
Short answer is that you're all good. The canonical is correct.
All the best,
Sean
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
-
Regarding Schema Tag
Hi, I have found out more errors related to schema tag when using this tag on this page. Please tell me which types of schema need to implement on this URL. https://www.giftalove.com/delhi
Technical SEO | | Packersmove0 -
Shopify Canonicals for Tagged Filters
I've been researching this topic endlessly and thought I had arrived at a solution but Screaming Frog indicates my solution was not successful. Problem: I used tags to filter my collections pages. The result, I discovered, was the creation of dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of additional collection URLs for each possible permutation of tag filters. I would like to make the collection page URL, with no tag filters, the canonical. Proposed Solution: I found the following code described somewhere as the solution: {% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} {% else %} {% endif %} However, I crawled my site with Screaming Frog and found that the canonical link element is still listed as the URL with the tags included. The crawler does recognizes the "noindex" instruction. Any ideas on what the best move is here?
Technical SEO | | vgusvg0 -
A few pages deindexed from Google .. PLEASE HELP!
My client has a fairly new site and we were agressively building content to the website. It is an ecommerce store and we have got a blog as well. We guest blogged in a few places and wrote 3-5 articles a day. Last few days, i noticed 3-4 pages that we were building links to got deindexed. What could be the reason? We weren't using any bots to build links, only a couple of it around 5-10 links to a page. Google WMT is not showing any messages and no manual action is seen. What could be the reason? I've submitted those URL for reindex and so far nothing seems to work. Any idea? Please help.
Technical SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
How long does it take to reindex the website
Generally speaking, how long does it take for Google to recrawl/reindex an (ecommerce) website? After changing a number of product subcategories from 'noindex' back to 'index', I regenerated the sitemap and have fetched as Google in WMT. This was a couple of weeks ago and no action yet. Second question: Does Google treat these pages as if they're brand new? I 'noindexed' them back in April, and they were ranking ok then. (I had noindexed them on the back of advice from my SEO, due to concerns about these pages being seen as duplicate content). Help!
Technical SEO | | Coraltoes770 -
Too Many noindex,follow Tags
Can you have too many pages on one site with noindex,follow tags? Just curious, because we're looking to noindex,follow lesser important pages such as bios about our team, privacy and terms, etc.
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
W3C html5 meta tags invalid?
Dear Mozers, we get errors when validating meta tags in html5. I know it's experimental and not all metas are valid, but how do you handle this? Leave the tags out? here are some examples: `…name="DC.title" content="my content...xyc.." /**>**` ``` `>` ``` `>` ``` `>` ``` `>` `>` I tried to find some information but couldn't. What would you do? Thanks a lot, Barbara
Technical SEO | | barbara-f0 -
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 -
Should i use NoIndex, Follow & Rel=Canonical Tag In One Page?
I am having pagination problem with one of my clients site , So I am deciding to use noindex, follow tag for the Page 2,3,4 etc for not to have duplicated content issue, Because obviously SEOMoz Crawl Diagnostics showing me lot of duplicate page contents. And past 2 days i was in constant battle whether to use noindex, follow tag or rel=canonical tag for the Page 2,3,4 and after going through all the Q&A,None of them gives me crystal clear answer. So i thought "Why can't i use 2 of them together in one page"? Because I think (correct me if i am wrong) 1.noindex, follow is old and traditional way to battle with dup contents
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle
2.rel=canonical is new way to battle with dup contents Reason to use 2 of them together is: Bot finds to the non-canonical page first and looks at the tag nofollow,index and he knows not to index that page,meantime he finds out that canonical url is something something according to the url given in the tag,NO? Help Please???0