Homepage has canonical tag pointing to innerpage
-
Hi,
I'm stuck! This e-commerce site which I'm currently working on has an unusual problem.
So the homepage has a canonical tag pointing to one of its category pages.
Is this okay SEO-wise? Based on what I understand, the homepage is the most important page in a site. And if there is a mirror duplication, it would be better to canonicalise the inner page to the homepage rather than in reverse.
Looking forward to getting some answers.
Cheers!
-
Hi Don,
Thank you for your response. The homepage and inner page are an exact duplicate (mirror).
Cheers!
-
Hi Nirdieb,
I would remove the canonical tag to the inner page. This was obviously a mistake. The home page is the most important page. Is that inner page a duplicate of the home page? I would think not.
Thanks,
Don Silvernail
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
-
Pointing additional domains at your main one
I have two questions: I have bought a domain that is a misspelled version of my domain. I have created an A record with DNS provider to point to my main domain's IP and on my main site I modified .htaccess file to make a 301 redirect if referrer is that misspelled domain. I also bought an expired domain with some relevant backlinks. I intend to create a simple page for that domain and add a link to my main site. Which of those two approaches are best from SEO point of view? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usabiliTEST_ux1 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
Putting Dates In Title Tag
Hi, I have a site were I write previews for sports match ups. I notice when I don't put the date in the title I rank much better for specific keywords. I also noticed that most people don't really put in the date when they do the search anyways, especially since google does a good job of showing the most recent pages anyways. The only reason I continue to put the date is because of this whole idea of not having page titles that are duplicate. So many of our games will be Team A vs Team B Preview, and Im worried that the term "preview" will become so repetitive that google may not like it. Any tips or ideas on how to approach this issue best? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz1 -
Canonical Tags?
I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content. The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly) are ranking higher than the "good URL" links. So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop. I even read that google might even completely overlook the links. I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions? Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Alt tags
What options do I have if all my images are pulled in by tags background images? It's a customized CMS and the designer put all images in the CSS so he would have more control over image size. I would like to somehow add description elements to the alt tags Thank, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeaDrive0 -
Does rel canonical need to be absolute?
Hi guys and gals, Our CMS has just been updated to its latest version which finally adds support for rel=canonical. HUZZAH!!! However, it doesn't add the absolute URL of the page. There is a base ref tag which looks like <base <="" span="">href="http://shop.confetti.co.uk/" /> On a page such as http://shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-favours the canonical tag looks like rel="canonical" href="/branch/wedding-favours" /> Does Google recognise this as a legitimate canonical tag? The SEOmoz On-Page Report Card doesn't recognise it as such. Any help would be great, Thanks in advance, Brendan.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Canonical issue with my Home Page
Hi, My site has several canonical issues that should be fixed. http://www.crosscountryallied.com For my Home Page, more links are pointing at www.crosscountryallied.com/ (887) than http:// http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ctAlliedWebSite (27). It is recommended that I implement a 301 redirect to recapture a significant amount of link value. The following lists show the most common canonicalization errors that can be produced when using default settings on my web server: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6 (IIS): http://www.crosscountryallied.com/ http://www.crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp (or .jsp depending on the version) http://crosscountryallied.com/ http://crosscountryallied.com/default.jsp or any combination with different capitalization. Each of these URLs spreads out the value of backlinks to our homepage. Should I just redirect them to: http://www.crosscountryallied.com and add a canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Canonical and optimization
Hi, I was thinking: If I had 4 pages, each of them optimized for an especific keyword, but set a canonical url to another page, would this another page rank for the 5 specific keywords? Ex: Page 1- Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroVillalobos
Page 2- Snickers
Page 3- Socks
Page 4- Feet
All set the canonical url to Page 5 Page 5 will rank for all this four keywords?0