Pages canonicaled to another appearing before the canonical on google searches
-
Hello,
When I do this google search, this page(amandine roses category) appears before the one it is canonical-ed to(this multi-product version of amandine roses).
This happens often with this multi-product template, where they don't rank as well as their category version(that are canonical to the multi-product version). Can someone maybe point us in the right direction on what the issue may be? What can be improved?
-
Placing a canonical tag on a webpage that points to a different URL is a suggestion to Google that the page is the same or extremely similar to the page at the specified URL. It is a suggestion that Google might or might not honor.
The more similar the pages the more likely Google is to honor the canonical instructions. If the pages are not substantially similar, Google will likely ignore the canonical.
Your example pages are very different so Google is likely ignoring the canonical instructions.
When Google and other search engines first decided to use canonical tags they were not very picky with how people used them. More recently Google has become more picky and is ignoring lots of canonicals and even ignoring canonicals that they use to honor.
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
-
Search function rendering cached pages incorrectly
On a category page the products are listed via/in connection with the search function on the site. Page source and front-end match as they should. However when viewing a browser rendered version of a google cached page the URL for the product has changed from, as an example - https://www.example.com/products/some-product to https://www.example.com/search/products/some-product The source is a relative URL in the correct format, so therefore /search/ is added at browser rendering. The developer insists that this is ok as the query string in the Google cache page result URL is triggering the behaviour, confusing the search function - all locally. I can see this but just wanted feedback that internally Google will only ever see the true source or will it's internal rendering mechanism possibly trigger similar behaviour?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards1 -
Kinds of organic search results (Google)
Not sure if this is a new "unit" for Google organic results. Please see the attached image. When searching for "invoice software", the top quarter of the page is a ribbon of products/brands with badly formatted logos. The fact that it's so ugly, and there's nothing marking it as a paid result, leads me to think it's organic. Anyone know what this SERP unit is called; and better still: How do you get included? We rank super high in the normal organic results, but don't appear at all in this product ribbon. y71A9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobM4161 -
Is there a way to rel = canonical only part of a page?
Hi guys: I'm doing SEO for a boat accessories store, and for instance they have marine AC systems, many of them, and while the part number, number of BTUs, voltage, and accessories change on some models, the description stays exactly the same across the board on many of them...people often search on Google by model number, and I worry that if I put rel = canonical, then the result for that specific model they're looking for won't come up, just the one that everything is being redirected to. (and people do this much more than entering a site nowadays and searching by product model, it's easier). Excuse my ignorance on this stuff, I'm good with link building and content creation, but the behind-the-scenes aspects... not so much: Can I "rel=canonical" only part of the page of the repeat models (the long description)? so people can still search by model number, and reach the model they are looking for? Am I misunderstanding something here about rel=canonical (Interesting thing, I rank very high for these pages with tons of repeat descriptions, number one in many places... but wonder if google attributes a sort of "across the site" penalty for the repeated content... but wouldn't ranking number 1 for these pages mean nothing's wrong?. Thanks)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidCiti1 -
Google Search Results...
I'm trying to download every google search results for my company site:company.com. The limit I can get is 100. I tried using seoquake but I can only get to 100. The reason for this? I would like to see what are the pages indexed. www pages, and subdomain pages should only make up 7,000 but search results are 23,000. I would like to see what the others are in the 23,000. Any advice how to go about this? I can individually check subdomains site:www.company.com and site:static.company.com, but I don't know all the subdomains. Anyone cracked this? I tried using a scrapper tool but it was only able to retrieve 200.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google Custom Searches with site CSS
Anyone good with GCS. I want to add Google custom searches in my site but with my site CSS.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | csfarnsworth
I need results from GCS but want to display with my website CSS. Website is in OSCommerce and php.0 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
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