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    4. Canonical and Alternate Advice

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    Canonical and Alternate Advice

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • JH_OffLimits
      JH_OffLimits Subscriber last edited by

      At the moment for most of our sites, we have both a desktop and mobile version of our sites. They both show the same content and use the same URL structure as each other. The server determines whether if you're visiting from either device and displays the relevant version of the site.

      We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph.

      Would the way of us doing it at the moment be correct?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
      • BlueprintMarketing
        BlueprintMarketing @Nigel_Carr last edited by

        That would normally be the case but not tonight.

        LOL, I am picking up a lot of the UK Q&A I will be at BrightonSEO and search love London if any of you guys will be in the area I'd love to grab a pint?

        sincerely,

        Thomas

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • Nigel_Carr
          Nigel_Carr @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

          The reason we answered 'quickly' by the way is because we are in the UK -  you were still in bed lol! 🙂

          BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Nigel_Carr
            Nigel_Carr @JH_OffLimits last edited by

            There is only ONE URL that is the point.

            If they share the same URL then you only have one page of code so ONE canonical

            Regards

            Nigel

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • BlueprintMarketing
              BlueprintMarketing @Nigel_Carr last edited by

              Sorry Nigel

              was not trying to make this more complicated was just trying to make sure that we were all on the same page.

              FYI if you need a method of adding the rel canonical to your website quickly you can use Google tag manager or if you want to add to the header

              https://support.stackpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001445283-EdgeRules-Adding-a-Canonical-Header

              Nigel_Carr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • JH_OffLimits
                JH_OffLimits Subscriber @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                So a self referencing canonical on both mobile and desktop versions of the site, regardless if they chuck out two version with the same content?

                Nigel_Carr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Nigel_Carr
                  Nigel_Carr @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                  Hi JH

                  I'm sure Thomas means well with his multiple complicated posts but all of this is totally unnecessary.

                  Both sites are serving the same URL

                  You can't put a rel=alternative because there is nothing to point to.

                  Just put a self-referencing canonical. I said that 2 hours ago!

                  That is all.

                  Regards Nigel

                  BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                  • BlueprintMarketing
                    BlueprintMarketing @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                    Use a self-referencing canonical

                    https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-recommend-self-referencing-canonical-tags/

                    Please let me know if you want me to remove the image below?

                    you can use this one if needed http://bseo.io/c1vMSv

                    mgkic5E.png

                    JH_OffLimits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • JH_OffLimits
                      JH_OffLimits Subscriber @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                      I've been told to pass on a URL, thanks for your help Thomas!

                      https://www.stag.com/

                      BlueprintMarketing Nigel_Carr 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                      • BlueprintMarketing
                        BlueprintMarketing @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                        Hey man I understand is a big deal

                        could you do me a huge favor and run your site through screaming frog SEO spider send me a couple of pages with the domains whited out so I can tell you 100% what to do in this situation because I am basing this on what you have told me and honestly I would like to look at what a tool can show me and that will tell me what I need to do.

                        Or you can tell me if the mobile version of the site hit's Google's index yes or no?

                        respectfully,

                        Tom

                        JH_OffLimits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • JH_OffLimits
                          JH_OffLimits Subscriber @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                          So both mobile and desktop require a self referencing canonical(in both headers)?

                          Sorry for the questions, just need to make sure! It's a very touchy subject!

                          BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • BlueprintMarketing
                            BlueprintMarketing @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                            The single self-referencing URL will work.

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • BlueprintMarketing
                              BlueprintMarketing @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                              What URLs are you  using with the “alternate” tag on?

                              You said 
                              ”1. We have multiple brand sites, that have a similar setup. They all have mobile and desktop versions of the sites running on the same URL, both of which show the same content.

                              2. The server determines whether if you're on a desktop or mobile devices using the header information, and points the user to the site relevant files for the given device.”

                              thats Dynamic serving same URL

                              Dynamic serving is a setup where the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL depending on which user agent requests the page (mobile, tablet, or desktop).

                              that would NOT give you the mobile or m.example.com & www.example.com different URLs

                              **But If you do have  a different  m.example.com & www.example.com  URLs you should use this code or  XML site maps **

                              for different URLs use this:

                              Annotations in the HTML

                              On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add the following annotation:

                              <linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only>

                              On the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:

                              <linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:>

                              This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

                              Or

                              Annotations in sitemaps

                              We support including the rel="alternate"annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:

                              <urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<="" span="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

                              <loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
                              <xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></urlsetxmlns="http:>

                              You should have the same URL on mobile and desktop

                              You should have the same rel canonical tag on your URLs unless and this is a big unless you're talking about using Google AMP?

                              If the URL you want to be indexed is the same URL point everything to that URL if that makes it easier to understand.

                              respectfully,

                              Tom

                              BlueprintMarketing JH_OffLimits 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • JH_OffLimits
                                JH_OffLimits Subscriber @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                Just to confirm, are we suppose to have a canonical on desktop and mobile or just desktop?

                                This would mean removing the alternate?

                                Want to confirm everything before iterating this across to others.

                                We are not using AMP, just a standard site setup.

                                BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                • BlueprintMarketing
                                  BlueprintMarketing @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                  Unless you are using AMP?

                                  Then you would add

                                  Linking pages with

                                  In order to solve this problem, we add information about the AMP page to the non-AMP page and vice versa, in the form of  tags in the .

                                  Add the following to the non-AMP page:

                                  <link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html">
                                  
                                  

                                  And this to the AMP page:

                                  <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/full/document.html">
                                  

                                  are you using AMP pages?

                                  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

                                  https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/discovery

                                  I hope that helps you if not please let me know.

                                  Respectfully,

                                  Tom

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • BlueprintMarketing
                                    BlueprintMarketing @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                                    Cool, that's what I thought when I heard your description I just wanted to be very thorough because sometimes you get very little information and I appreciate you letting me know that.

                                    dynamic  serving URLs are identical to each other so you should have a self-referencing canonical tag because the URL does not change the real canonical tag just decides what should be in the index and the same URL.

                                    You're Rel canonical should be something like this example below

                                    Example URL https://www.example.com/example-url/

                                    because the end URL is the same and URL that you want to be indexed in Google you want to be certain that you have a self-referencing URL to prevent query strings and other things like that and you do not need to point a URL to an identical URL you just need a self-referencing canonical if that makes sense.

                                    See: https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

                                    I hope that is of help,

                                    Tom

                                    BlueprintMarketing JH_OffLimits 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                    • JH_OffLimits
                                      JH_OffLimits Subscriber @BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                      Hi,

                                      I can't give off too much information as it's not my call, but I can answer your questions without mentioning the brands.

                                      1. We have multiple brand sites, that have a similar setup. They all have mobile and desktop versions of the sites running on the same URL, both of which show the same content.

                                      2. The server determines whether if you're on a desktop or mobile devices using the header information, and points the user to the site relevant files for the given device.

                                      3. Our sites would quite clearly fit in the dynamic serving category.

                                      We have 301 redirects on none www to www and http to https.

                                      BlueprintMarketing 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                      • effectdigital
                                        effectdigital @Nigel_Carr last edited by

                                        This is the correct solution!

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • Nigel_Carr
                                          Nigel_Carr @JH_OffLimits last edited by

                                          The URLs are identical it is just the content that is served that may be slightly different.

                                          Since you can only specify one canonical for each URL it makes no difference. Just self-reference and that is it.

                                          If you had to different URLs then it would be an issue where you woudl need a rel=alternative so there is nothing to worry about.

                                          Regards

                                          Nigel

                                          effectdigital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                                          • BlueprintMarketing
                                            BlueprintMarketing last edited by

                                            You guys are fast I was going to answer this and had to do some other things but let me weigh in on couple things.

                                            as you said

                                            “We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags**. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph.”**

                                            so what you’re saying is that you have a dynamic site so you don’t need to add “alternate"media” tags to the site.

                                            https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving

                                            As it is not immediately apparent in this setup that the site alters the HTML for mobile user agents (the mobile content is "hidden" when crawled with a desktop user agent), it’s  recommend that the server send a hint to request that Googlebot for smartphones also crawl the page, and thus discover the mobile content. This hint is implemented using the Vary HTTP header.

                                            **you don’t need this **

                                            Annotations in the HTML

                                            On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add the following annotation:

                                            <code dir="ltr"><linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only></code> 
                                            

                                            On the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:

                                             <code dir="ltr"><linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:></code> 
                                            

                                            This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.

                                            Annotations in sitemaps

                                            We support including the rel="alternate"annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:

                                             <code dir="ltr"><urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<br="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
                                              <url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
                                                <xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></url></urlsetxmlns="http:></code> 
                                            

                                            The required rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page's HTML.

                                            **to be sure **

                                            Are you willing to share your domain with us? Or one domain?

                                            1. We're talking about multiple websites that all have the identical site structure or at least mobile and desktop site structure?

                                            2. Your server is making the change for you?

                                            3. Would you be kind enough to install this plug-in on chrome in order for you to show a couple examples of the canonical and the URL?

                                            • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/portents-seo-page-review/babgchcegnkbiojmdpnoilficladccfm?hl=en-US
                                            • https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-redirect-trace/nnpljppamoaalgkieeciijbcccohlpoh?hl=en

                                            In addition, would you be kind enough to run your site through the two tools here ( 100% free and very easy to use)

                                            • https://varvy.com/mobile/
                                            • https://varvy.com/
                                            • &
                                            • https://redbot.org/

                                            If you would not mind doing this and sending screenshots it would mean a lot to us and getting your canonical's straightened out.

                                            screenshots https://snag.gy/  then upload to http://imgur.com/

                                            everything is on the same server I'm assuming?

                                            Of the three below how would you categorize your site?

                                            1. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls
                                            2. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving
                                            3. https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design

                                            Respectfully,

                                            Tom

                                            JH_OffLimits 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                            • JH_OffLimits
                                              JH_OffLimits Subscriber @Nigel_Carr last edited by

                                              Would this mean we need canonical only on desktop or mobile site?

                                              Nigel_Carr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                              • Nigel_Carr
                                                Nigel_Carr @effectdigital last edited by

                                                You are right - you could only use teh rel=alternate if there was an m. version or similar

                                                Regards

                                                Nigel

                                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                                • effectdigital
                                                  effectdigital @Nigel_Carr last edited by

                                                  The self referencing canonical advice was solid and I 100% agree with it. The rel=alternate advice, I felt would cause problems (IMO). But as we all know, fiddly issues like this are highly subjective

                                                  Nigel_Carr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                                  • Nigel_Carr
                                                    Nigel_Carr @effectdigital last edited by

                                                    Then there is no problem simply putting a self-referencing canonical. There is in effect no mobile version as there is a single URL so no need for a rel=alternate.

                                                    It's an even easier solution. Well, there isn't a problem in the first place.

                                                    rel=alternate is only necessary if you have two different URLs! The fact they are the same takes away the problem.

                                                    Regards

                                                    Nigel

                                                    effectdigital JH_OffLimits 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                                    • effectdigital
                                                      effectdigital last edited by

                                                      Your problem is that you have two different sites loading on the same URL. If you are returning both the mobile and desktop / laptop site on the same URL, you would be expected to be using responsive design. In-fact, you may have re-invented another different way to implement responsive design which is probably, slightly less fluid yet slightly more efficient :')

                                                      Since your mobile and desktop pages both reside on exactly the same URL, I'd test the page(s) with this tool (the mobile friendly tool) and this tool (the page-speed insights tool). If Google correctly views your site as mobile friendly, and if within PageSpeed insights Google is correctly differentiating between the mobile and desktop site versions (check the mobile and desktop tabs) then both URLs should canonical to themselves (self referencing canonical) and no alternate tag should be used or deployed. Google will misread the alternate tag, which points to itself - as an error. That tag is to be used when your separate mobile site (page) exists on a separate URL, like an 'm.' subdomain or something like that

                                                      Imagine you are Googlebot. You are crawling in desktop mode, load the desktop URL version and find that the page says, it (itself) is also the mobile page. You'd get really confused

                                                      Check to see whether your implementation is even supported by Google using the tools I linked you to. If it is, then just use self referencing canonical tags and do not deploy alternate tags (which would make no sense, since both versions of the site are on the same URL). When people build responsive sites (same source code on the same URL, but it's adaptive CSS which re-organises the contents of the page based upon viewport widths) - they don't use alternate tags, only canonicals

                                                      Since your situation is more similar to responsive design (from a crawling perspective) than it is to separate mobile site design, drop the alt

                                                      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                                      • effectdigital
                                                        effectdigital @Nigel_Carr last edited by

                                                        The problem with this is, where you say "corresponding mobile URL" - there isn't one as OP has stated that, two different source codes  (pages) can be rendered on the same URL depending upon the user's screen size / user-agent (however they are detecting mobile, and serving different pages)

                                                        Nigel_Carr 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                                        • Nigel_Carr
                                                          Nigel_Carr last edited by

                                                          Hi JH

                                                          This is very straightforward.

                                                          Use the following annotations:

                                                          1. On the desktop page, add a  rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site’s mobile pages.
                                                          2. On the mobile page, add a link rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.

                                                          It is that simple and doing this will not create duplicate content

                                                          More here: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls

                                                          Regards Nigel

                                                          effectdigital 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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                                                          • tomcraig86

                                                            Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch

                                                            Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks

                                                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig86
                                                            0
                                                          • GalcoIndustrial

                                                            Lowercase VS. Uppercase Canonical tags?

                                                            Hi MOZ, I was hoping that someone could help shed some light on an issue I'm having with URL structure and the canonical tag. The company I work for is a distributor of electrical products and our E-commerce site is structured so that our URL's (specifically, our product detail page URL's) include a portion (the part #) that is all uppercase (e.g: buy/OEL-Worldwide-Industries/AFW-PG-10-10). The issue is that we have just recently included a canonical tag in all of our product detail pages and the programmer that worked on this project has every canonical tag in lowercase instead of uppercase.  Now, in GWT, I'm seeing over 20,000-25,000 "duplicate title tags" or "duplicate descriptions". Is this an issue?  Could this issue be resolved by simply changing the canonical tag to reflect the uppercase URL's?  I'm not too well versed in canonical tags and would love a little insight. Thanks!

                                                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GalcoIndustrial
                                                            0
                                                          • aactive

                                                            Yoast & rel canonical for paginated Wordpress URLs

                                                            Hello, our Wordpress blog at http://www.jobs.ca/career-resources has a rel canonical issue since we added pagination to the front page and category-pages. We're using Yoast and it's incorrectly applying a rel-canonical meta tag referencing page 1 on page 2, 3, etc. This is a known misuse of the rel-canonical tag (per Google's Webmaster Blog - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html, which says rel-canonical should be replaced with rel-prev and rel-next for page 2, 3, etc.). We don't see a way to specify anywhere in Yoast's options to correct this behaviour for page 2, 3, etc. Yoast allows you to override a page's canonical URL, otherwise it automatically uses the Wordpress permalink. My question is, does anyone know how to configure Yoast to properly replace rel-canonical tags with rel-prev and rel-next for paginated URLs, or do I need to look at another plugin or customize the behavior directly in my child theme code? This issue was brought up here as well: http://moz.com/community/q/canonical-help, but the only response did not relate to Yoast. (We're using Wordpress 3.6.1 and Yoast "Wordpress SEO" 1.4.18)

                                                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aactive
                                                            0
                                                          • Netrepid

                                                            Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?

                                                            I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.

                                                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid
                                                            0
                                                          • JosephFrost

                                                            Canonical link vs root domain

                                                            I have a wordpress website installed on http://domain.com/home/ instead of http://domain.com  - Does it matter whether I leave it that way with a canonical link from the domain.com to the domain.com/home/ or should I move the wordpress files and database to the root domain?

                                                            Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JosephFrost
                                                            0

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