Effect of rel canonical on links
-
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page?
For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a
How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
-
Nice video.
Keep in mind rel=canonical is designed for pages which presently basically the same content. For example if you sell widgets then you might have a page sorted by price ascending, another by price descending, another by color, etc. All of these pages show the same content presented slightly differently. Often the links on each page will be identical.
-
FYI everyone, I've only just come across this video where Matt Cutts (kind of) deals with this question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQzUixVCzo
Just because a page is rel canonical'd to another page does not mean Google will not crawl those links.
-
I can't say I've analyzed this in detail, but I would believe since rel=canonical is meant to be used to denote extremely similar content or even content that is exactly the same, that the way it handles links on the B page shouldn't matter, since this should be essentially the exact same as the content on the A page.
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
-
Keyword links in footer
Hi - I am trying to help a site to get out from under a Google manual action penalty - down as "Partial Matches - Unnatural Links to site".
Technical SEO | | StevieD
I am checking through their links - the site that links most to them is a local directory style site - it has 2,682 links back into 1 page (Home) The directory site was built by the web co. that built my clients' site and they put a keyword link in the footer of the directory site - the keyword was "Buy Truffles". All my instincts say that is a bad thing! But - this is what is perplexing me - they are ranking no.1 for that keyword! Whereas they have lost rankings (i.e. not top 50) for all the other keywords they were targeting. So I don't get it! Can anyone explain why this is. I feel I should I get that link removed but don't want to take out their only ranking keyword! Webmaster shows about 55 different pages in the directory site have a link back to my client. Hope you can help.
Cheers - Steve0 -
Toxic Link Removal
Greetings Moz Community: Recently I received an site audit from a MOZ certified SEO firm. The audit concluded that technically the site did not have major problems (unique content, good architecture). But the audit identified a high number of toxic links. Out of 1,300 links approximately 40% were classified as suspicious, 55% as toxic and 5% as healthy. After identifying the specific toxic links, the SEO firm wants to make a Google disavow request, then manually request that the links be removed, and then make final disavow request of Google for the removal of remaining bad links. They believe that they can get about 60% of the bad links removed. Only after the removal process is complete do they think it would be appropriate to start building new links. Is there a risk that this strategy will result in a drop of traffic with so many links removed (even if they are bad)? For me (and I am a novice) it would seem more prudent to build links at the same time that toxic links are being removed. According to the SEO firm, the value of the new links in the eyes of Google would be reduced if there were many toxic links to the site; that this approach would be a waste of resources. While I want to move forward efficiently I absolutely want to avoid a risk of a drop of traffic. I might add that I have not received any messages from Google regarding bad links. But my firm did engage in link building in several instances and our traffic did drop after the Penguin update of April 2012. Also, is there value in having a professional SEO firm remove the links and build new ones? Or is this something I can do on my own? I like the idea of having a pro take care of this, but the costs (Audit, coding, design, content strategy, local SEO, link removal, link building, copywriting) are really adding up. Any thoughts??? THANKS,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Canonical Question
Can someone please help me with a question, I am learning about Canonical URls at the moment and have had some errors come up, it is saying ```![Priority 1](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/p1.png)This page has multiple rel=canonical tags.Line 9 Best Practice[![](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/dropbox.png)](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/res/2.view.htm#)![Help](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/help.png)Search engine behavior is unpredictable when a page has multiple canonical tags. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate RSS Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate Atom Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/atom/" /><link rel="pingback" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/xmlrpc.php" />That canonical link to Feed? should that be there, I know the Plugin has done this but I am lost to what should be there, I have no duplicate pages as far as I am aware than needs a canonical URL ??Thanks ``` >
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Canonical warnings
[1] My site development tool (XSP) has recently added the canonical reference as an auto-generated tag, so every page of my site now has it. Why is SEOmoz warning me that I have hundreds of pages of canonicals if it's supposed to be a GOOD thing? [2] Google is still seeing the pages without the canonical tag because that's how they were indexed. Will they eventually get purged from their index, or should I be proactive about that, and if so, how? Thanks for any input.
Technical SEO | | PatioLifeStyle0 -
Should rel canonical tags include the root domain
It does sound like a silly question but bear with me a little... I recently installed on my Joomla website a module that automatically creates rel canonical tags for pages that contain lists that can be sorted by different criteria: (price, alphabetic order, etc...) I know that a proper canonical tag should look like this: However, the module I'm using creates the following structure Will this work? I mean, will it be "understood" by the bots? To see what the module actually does, you can visit the following link http://www.quipeutlefaire.fr/fr/index.php?sort=price&sort_direction=desc&limit=10&limitstart=0&option=com_auctions&category=240 In the source code you will see that the canonical tag is Which is the original "unsorted" page. Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | QPLF0 -
What should i do with the links for "Login", "Register", "My Trolley" links on every page.
My website ommrudraksha has 3 links on every page. 1. Login 2. Register 3. My trolley My doubt is i do not want to give any weightage to these links. does these links will be calculated when page links are calculated ? Should i remove these as links and place these as buttons ? ( with look a like of link visually ? )
Technical SEO | | Ommrudraksha0 -
How rel=canonical works with index, noindex ?
Hello all, I had always wondered how the index,noindex affects to the canonical. And also if the canonical post should be included in the sitemap or not. I posted this http://www.comparativadebancos.co... and with a rel=canonical to this that was published at the beginning of the month http://www.comparativadebancos.co... but then I have the first one in google http://www.google.com/search?aq=f... May be this is evident for you but, what is really doing the canonical? If I publish something with the canonical pointing to another page, will it still be indexed by google but with no penalty for duplicate content? Or the usual behaviour should have been to havent indexed the first post but just the second one? Should I also place a noindex in the first post in addition to the canonical? What am I missing here? thanks
Technical SEO | | antorome0