Canonical tag on a large site
-
when would you reccomend using a canonical tag on a large site?
-
Hi Cristiana
Answering your question, I will say that canonical-tag to a site is not an option is a requirement, almost mandatory requirement. The canonical tag is directly related to the duplicated content issues.
From a technical standpoint, you'll need to understand how duplicate content can unintentionally be added to a site. Many times, it's simply a canonicalization issue. For example, homepage canonicalization causes most duplicate content issues on sites.
For example, search crawlers might be able to reach your homepage in all of the following ways:
-
https:yoursite.com
-
https:www.yoursite.com
-
http:yoursite.com
-
http:www.yoursite.com
Just to give you an example on Google Search Console you need to verify these versions of a single domain for single property
-
http:www.yoursite.com
-
https:www.yoursite.com
-
http:yoursite.com
-
https:yoursite.com
Google will see each URL as a different page – and it won't know which one you prefer to send users to. The problem can get exponentially worse if it exists on every page on your site.
The easiest way to solve the problem is with a server-side redirect that sets one of those URLs as the “official” version of the page, and only serves that version, regardless of which URL was the destination.
You can also use the rel canonical tag – it's a directive that's inserted in the header of the page. It looks like this: rel='canonical'
When you're starting SEO on a new site, you'll want to check out all of the canonicalization that's been declared, so that you have a solid understanding of what's going on with the site content.
-
-
From day 1!
What platform is the site on? It could be a simple task to add the canonical tag.
-
Generally, I like to see them in place with any site we review, but here is a great WBF that outlines some examples of when to use canonicals.
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
-
Canonical tags for duplicate listings
Hi there, We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control. The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages. The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed. Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place? This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together. What are your thoughts? Thanks Issa
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQi0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
How are these sites ranking!?!
One of our clients is in the insurance industry and over the last 12 months we have seen an increasing number of low quality, newly registered, spammy sites achieving top 5 rankings for major keywords, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the rankings for our client. Does anyone have any idea how the following sites have managed to do this: http://www.multiquotetaxi.co.uk/ - 2nd for taxi insurance http://www.motortradefast.co.uk/ - 1st for motor trade insurance http://www.traders-insurance.com/ - 3rd for motor trade insurance http://www.multiquotefleet.co.uk/ - 1st for fleet insurance We have tried reporting the above sites, tried holding out to see if they get penalised and tried figuring out what they have done ourselves but cannot see how they have managed it. Any ideas at all?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | instinctive0 -
Severe health issues are found on your site. - Check site health (GWT)
Hi, We run a Magento website - When i log in to Google Webmaster Tools, I am getting this message: Severe health issues are found on your site. - <a class="GNHMM2RBFH">Check site health
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs2010
</a>Is robots.txt blocking important pages? Some important page is blocked by robots.txt. Now, this is the weird part - the page being blocked is the admin page of magento - under
www.domain.com/index.php/admin/etc..... Now, this message just wont go away - its been there for days now - so why does Google think this is an "important page"? It doesnt normally complain if you block other parts of the site ?? Any ideas? THanks0 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Site dancing
Hi guys I have a site which is dancing. I mean one day is on position 20 , if I put more backlinks is falling, after rising again,, I dont know what is going on. The site is 2 years old, pr 2, authority 35. Why this is happening? Usually when he appears again is ranking higher, but today he disappear totally from rankings. Maybe return tomorrow? But anyway why is dancing? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nyanainc0