Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
-
Hi everyone,
I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results).
The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past.
We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed.
I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages.
This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns.
• Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative?
• Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about?
I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com.
Canonical points to
https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html
In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for)
Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out.
Thanks!
-
No upvotes for the righteous?
-
@GAnalytics said in Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page:
Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative?
I believe that it's fine to do that. But I would still avoid indexing duplicate content in google. Index the best one and remove the others, won't affect your backlinks.
-
@webduh I agree with you. I have also used this strategy for the website and it is working fine. Thank you for sharing with us.
Brody Nienow from: https://whiteroseshub.com/ -
@GAnalytics The search filtered pages appear to have value added to me. a Solar Installation Company Fafco.com uses a calendar that points to events that don't exist and ranks for hundreds of words for it. I think you should be fine. Please feel free to backlink Webduh.com if this advice helps
David with Webduh.com
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
-
Why MOZ just index some of the links?
hello everyone i've been using moz pro for a while and found a lot of backlink oppertunites as checking my competitor's backlink profile.
Link Building | | seogod123234
i'm doing the same way as my competitors but moz does not see and index lots of them, maybe just index 10% of them. though my backlinks are commenly from sites with +80 and +90 DA like Github, Pinterest, Tripadvisor and .... and the strange point is that 10% are almost from EDU sites with high DA. i go to EDU sites and place a comment and in lots of case, MOZ index them in just 2-3 days!! with maybe just 10 links like this, my DA is incresead from 15 to 19 in less than one month! so, how does this "SEO TOOL" work?? is there anyway to force it to crawl a page?0 -
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Unsolved Crawling only the Home of my website
Hello,
Product Support | | Azurius
I don't understand why MOZ crawl only the homepage of our webiste https://www.modelos-de-curriculum.com We add the website correctly, and we asked for crawling all the pages. But the tool find only the homepage. Why? We are testing the tool before to suscribe. But we need to be sure that the tool is working for our website. If you can please help us.0 -
Google Not Indexing Pages (Wordpress)
Hello, recently I started noticing that google is not indexing our new pages or our new blog posts. We are simply getting a "Discovered - Currently Not Indexed" message on all new pages. When I click "Request Indexing" is takes a few days, but eventually it does get indexed and is on Google. This is very strange, as our website has been around since the late 90's and the quality of the new content is neither duplicate nor "low quality". We started noticing this happening around February. We also do not have many pages - maybe 500 maximum? I have looked at all the obvious answers (allowing for indexing, etc.), but just can't seem to pinpoint a reason why. Has anyone had this happen recently? It is getting very annoying having to manually go in and request indexing for every page and makes me think there may be some underlying issues with the website that should be fixed.
Technical SEO | | Hasanovic1 -
What is the correct Canonical tag on m.site?
We have 2 separate sites for desktop (www.example.com) and mobile (m.example.com) As per the guideline, we have added Rel=alternate tag on www.example.com to point to mobile URL(m.example.com) and Rel=canonical tag on m.example.com to point to Desktop site(www.example.com).However, i didn't find any guideline on what canonical tag we should add ifFor Desktop sitewww.example.com/PageA - has a canonical tag to www.example.com/PageBOn this page, we have a Rel=alternate tag m.example.com/pageAWhat will be the canonical we should add for the mobile version of Page Am.example.com/PageA - Canonical tag point to www.example.com/PageA -or www.example.com/PageB?Kalpesh
Technical SEO | | kguard0 -
Does Title Tag location in a page's source code matter?
Currently our meta description is on line 8 for our page - http://www.paintball-online.com/Paintball-Guns-And-Markers-0Y.aspx
Technical SEO | | Istoresinc
The title tag, however sits below a bunch of code on line 237
Does the location of the title tag, meta tags, and any structured data have any influence with respect to SEO and search engines? Put another way, could we benefit from moving the title tag up to the top?
I "surfed 'n surfed" and could not find any articles about this.
I would really appreciate any help on this as our site got decimated organically last May and we are looking for any help with SEO.
NIck
0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags
Hey guys, My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution... My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform. I use Yoast SEO plugin. The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example. The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags: I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically. Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically. Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed." Problem: Am I doing this the way it should be done? I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page). One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder. Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated. 🙂 Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.
Technical SEO | | sidstar0