Canonical tag?
-
I have an e-commerce website and the query strings of the URL's are causing duplicate content/titles. I'm thinking of adding a site-wide canonical tag which should fix them all. Any other ideas of making it neater or better?
-
Thanks guys, much appreciated. Think I'll implement the canonical tag.
-
either use rel=canonical, its use is just this purpose and saying this is the origin of content.
or if it's not an important page to you add it to robots.txt and remove it from search -
either way it will fix the issue... another could be to look at if you can fix those variables into friendly urls which you can then pull things from for your title for instance... but thats a bit more complex and usually not worth thinking about.
-
You can also change your parameter setting in webmaster tools to tell google not to index these pages. You can find this URL-parameters setting under configuration.
For further information on possible usage of the canonical tag this post from Dr. Pete from earlier this week might be helpful!
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
-
H2 tags always recommended? Or ok without?
Is it ok to have no h2 tags? There are no "keywords" relevant to the product in these example h2 tags. Also, is it ok to not have a PRODUCT DESCRIPTION header, or is it better with that header? It's for a "product page". Examples: <h1>Used Bow Front Desk With Mahogany Laminate</h1> <h2 style="display:inline;">QTY:</h2> 3 - <h2 style="display:inline;">Manufacturer:</h2> Hon <h2>Product Description:</h2> <p>This bow front desk is in excellent condition. It has a beautiful mahogany laminate.</p> OR (no h2 tags or product description header at all) <h1>Used Bow Front Desk With Mahogany Laminate</h1> <p>QTY: 3 - Manufacturer: Hon</p> <p>This bow front desk is in excellent condition. It has a beautiful mahogany laminate.</p> I prefer the last one as it's much simpler, but I'm curious if search engines would prefer the existence of h2 tags in the first version. Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | NRSmart
Todd0 -
Should you 301, 302, or rel=canonical private pages?
What should you do with private 'logged in' pages from a seo perspective? They're not visible to crawlers and shouldn't be indexed, so what is best practice? Believe it or not, we have found quite a few back links to private pages and want to get the ranking benefit from them without them being indexed. Eg: http://twiends.com/settings (Only logged in user can see the page) 302 them: We can redirect users/crawlers temporarily, but I believe this is not ideal from a seo perspective? Do we lose the link juice to this page? 301 them: We can do a permanent redirect with a short cache time. We preserve most link juice now, but we probably mess up the users browser. Users trying to reach a private page while logged out may have issues reaching it after logged in. **Serve another page with rel=canonical tag: **We could serve back the home page without changing the URL. We use a canonical tag to tell the crawlers that it's a duplicate of the home page. We keep most of the link juice, and the browser is unaffected. Yes, a user might share that different URL now, but its unlikely. We've been doing 302's up until now, now we're testing the third option. How do others solve this problem? Is there a problem with it? Any advice appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | dsumter0 -
What is the Impact of Canonical to a Canonical Page?
hey folks, How does google respond to this, canonical to a canonical page? i.e page A is canonical to Page which is already/also canonical to PAGE C. Thanks In advance AK
On-Page Optimization | | AnkammaRao0 -
Noindex tags in WordPress
I'm receiving 4 duplicate content warnings from Roger.They are all "www.mysite/tag/tag-name". I'm using WordPress and have Yoast WordPress SEO installed. Should I set the tags to "noindex" in the plugin settings?
On-Page Optimization | | brandzz0 -
Is there a set length / restriction on ALT tag content?
Something in which is an essential part of any site but I cant for the life of me remember if there is a set / recommended limit to the size if should be or is restricted to.
On-Page Optimization | | SamPenno0 -
Duplicate Content- Best Practise Usage of the canonical url
Canonical urls stop self competition - from duplicate content. So instead of a 2 pages with a rank of 5 out of 10, it is one page with a rank of 7 out of 10.
On-Page Optimization | | WMA
However what disadvantages come from using canonical urls. For example am I excluding some products like green widet, blue widget. I have a customer with 2 e-commerce websites(selling different manufacturers of a type jewellery). Both websites have massive duplicate content issues.
It is a hosted CMS system with very little SEO functionality, no plugins etc. The crawling report- comes back with 1000 of pages that are duplicates. It seems that almost every page on the website has a duplicate partner or more. The problem starts in that they have 2 categorys for each product type, instead of one category for each product type.
A wholesale category and a small pack category. So I have considered using a canonical url or de-optimizing the small pack category as I believe it receives less traffic than the whole category. On the original website I tried de- optimizing one of the pages that gets less traffic. I did this by changing the order of the meta title(keyword at the back, not front- by using small to start of with). I also removed content from the page. This helped a bit. Or I was thinking about just using a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic.
However what are the implications of this? What happens if some one searches for "small packs" of the product- will this no longer be indexed as a page. The next problem I have is the other 1000s of pages that are showing as duplicates. These are all the different products within the categories. The CMS does not have a front office that allows for canonical urls to be inserted. Instead it would have to be done going into the html of the pages. This would take ages. Another issue is that these product pages are not actually duplicate, but I think it is because they have such little content- that the rodger(seo moz crawler, and probably googles one too) cant tell the difference.
Also even if I did use the canonical url - what happened if people searched for the product by attributes(the variations of each product type)- like blue widget, black widget, brown widget. Would these all be excluded from Googles index.
On the one hand I want to get rid of the duplicate content, but I also want to have these pages included in the search. Perhaps I am taking too idealistic approach- trying to optimize a website for too many keywords. Should I just focus on the category keywords, and forget about product variations. Perhaps I look into Google Analytics, to determine the top landing pages, and which ones should be applied with a canonical. Also this website(hosted CMS) seems to have more duplicate content issues than I have seen with other e-commerce sites that I have applied SEO MOZ to On final related question. The first website has 2 landing pages- I think this is a techical issue. For example www.test.com and www.test.com/index. I realise I should use a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic. How do I determine this? (or should I just use the SEO MOZ Page rank tool?)0 -
Title Tag suggestions for blog....
Hi Guys. I have been sorting out title tags for a photography site. I have given each page within the website a different title tag but now Im unsure as what I should do with the blog. Blog title tag is currently "Portrait Photographer London | Company Name Blog" This is fine however wordpress combines the homepage title tag with the title of each blog post and imo makes for a long & cumbersome title...such as : "The Obamas Family Portrait | Portrait Photographer London | Company Name Blog" I'm pretty sure I could do better and should do better but Im at a loss, what do you guys think?
On-Page Optimization | | RankStealer0 -
Nofollow tags
So on the homepage, should all the links like privacy, contact us, etc...be rel="nofollow" ? I want to get a better handle on passing as much link juice on homepage to important internal pages as I can, and want to get it right. Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | azguy1