Defining Canonical First and Later No Indexing
-
We found some repetitive pages on site which has mostly sort or filter parameters, tried lot to remove them but nothing much improvement
Is it correct way that:-
a) We are creating new pages altogther of that section and putting up rel canonical tag from old ones to new ones
b) Now, after canonical declared, we will noindex the old pages
Is it a correct way to let new pages supercede the old pages with new pages.
-
Happy Monday to you!
I agree with Mike - you need to use the 301 redirect to point from the old pages to the new pages.
If you are reworking the site, and have to use parameters, consider dropping the parameters in a hash - this hides them to the bots and you get full SEO benefit for links
Credit Rand for this excellent walk through - http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash
There are other ways to deal with parameters and re-sorts of a result page, but it depends on your situation. Bottom line, if you are going through the effort of a site restructure, don't set yourself up to end up with the same problem you have now. Figure out what your "Golden URLs" are for categories and products around key words and then find a way to "hide" all the other versions of those same pages (in this example you want to hide all the re-sorted and search result pages) from Google. This is why I would often use a "no follow, no index" meta tag on a page vs a canonical. Do not waste GoogleBot's time crawling a bunch of pages that you are not wanting to rank anyway. Setup the structure so the crawl is clear and focused on the pages that are the most important.
Cheers!
-
-
If you have older content and you create newer relevant content that you want people to see instead of the older content, you likely want a 301 redirect. In this way, all (mostly all) of the link equity is passed to the newer content which will eventually rank in place of the older content.
-
If you have duplicate pages like those caused by a parameter where site.com/page1 is the same as site.com/page1?this=x then you should canonicalize the page and its parameters to site.com/page1. In this way, the search engines understand that page1 is the real version of the content and thanks to the canonical will eventually take the place of the parametered versions that had been appearing in the SERPs.
Appendix to 1... down the road, those older pages that were redirect may wind up with no more links pointing to them from anywhere and no traffic going to them. At this point you may consider just 404ing the older page if you'd like to clean up older, less useful redirects.
Appendix to 2... A Canonical is a suggestion, not a directive. This means that the search engines do not have to follow it if they feel it is not entirely relevant.
-
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
-
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Rel=canonical on pre-migration website
I have an e-commerce client that is migrating platforms. The current structure of their existing website has led to what I would believe to be mass duplicate content. They have something north of 150,000 indexed URLs. However, 143,000+ of these have query strings and the content is identical to pages without any query string. Even so, the site does pretty well from an organic stand point compared to many of its direct competitors. Here is my question: (1) I am assuming that I should go into WMT (Google/Bing) and tell both search engines to ignore query strings. (2) In a review of back links, it does appear that there is a mish mash of good incoming links both to the clean and the dirty URLs. Should I add a rel=canonical via a script to all the pages with query strings before we make our migration and allow the search engines some time to process? (3) I'm assuming I can continue to watch the indexation of the URLs, but should I also tell search engines to remove the URLs of the dirty URLs? (4) Should I do Fetch in WMT? And if so, what sequence should I do for 1-4. How long should I wait between doing the above and undertaking the migration?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ExploreConsulting0 -
Index or not index Categories
We are using Yoast Seo plugin. On the main menu we have only categories which has consist of posts and one page. We have category with villas, category with villa hotels etc. Initially we set to index and include in the sitemap posts and excluded categories, but I guess it was not correct. Would be a better way to index and include categories in the sitemap and exclude the posts in order to avoid the duplicate? It somehow does not make sense for me, If the posts are excluded and the categories included, will not then be the categories empty for google? I guess I will get crazy of this. Somebody has perhaps more experiences with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rebeca10 -
What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"? and is it dangerous to have both of these elements combined together? One of my client's page has the these two elements and kind of bothers me because I only know link rel="canonical" to be relevant to remove duplicates. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Indexed Pages in Google, How do I find Out?
Is there a way to get a list of pages that google has indexed? Is there some software that can do this? I do not have access to webmaster tools, so hoping there is another way to do this. Would be great if I could also see if the indexed page is a 404 or other Thanks for your help, sorry if its basic question 😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Canonical Related question
I have a site where we have search and result pages, google webmaster tool was giving me duplicate content error for page 1 / 2 / 3 etc etc so i have added canonical on these pages like http://www.business2sell.com/businesses/california/ Is this is correct way of using canonical ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | manish_khanna0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
First link importance in the content
Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 : Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this. http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457 I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore ! Do you remember this study and have the link ? What is your opinion on Matt's point ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baptisteplace0