Google is indexing urls with parameters despite canonical
-
Hello Moz,
Google is indexing lots of urls despite the canonical in my site. Those urls are linked all over the site with parameters like ?, and looks like Google is indexing them despite de canonical. Is Google deciding to index those urls because they are linked all over the site? The canonical tag is well implemented.
-
Hi there,
As has been pointed out, the rel=canonical tag is just a suggestion to Google that you don't want a page to be indexed or to rank. They can choose to ignore the tag if they want to. If you want to keep pages out of the index, there are a few options:
-
The rel=canonical tag as you've tried
-
Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above
-
Use the URL parameters configuration option in Google Webmaster Tools
Give that you've tried the first one, I'd recommend giving the second two options a try and seeing what happens.
I hope that helps!
Paddy
-
-
I believe the problem here is being caused by the fact that you are using relative, rather than absolute URLs for your canonical tag. I've seen this happen before on a site I was working on. Thanks to awesome suggestions from Moz Q & A from community member George Andrews (endorsed by Dr. Pete Meyers), we updated all of our canonical tags to be absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. This completely solved the exact problem you are describing.
Here's a link to that thread: http://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-proper-syntax-for-rel-canonical
The best news is, it's a very easy, inexpensive and quick SEO win. I love those!
Dana
-
Thanks for your answerk, but I don't think this can be the solition.
The problem is that Google is indexing urls with parameters, so, I can see in SERPS those urls indexed despite the canonical
But in code you can see:
www.myweb.com/url123?type=3 has the rel="canonical" href="//myweb.com/url123" />
-
Hi,
The rel canonical tag won't prevent pages from being indexed - all it does is act as a way to 'suggest' to Google that there is a preferred page. if you don't want pages indexing, you have to prevent Google from crawling and indexing them (noindex).
-Andy
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
-
URL, page title, item name - which is most important for google ranking
We are a bridal store and are able to use different information in the URL, Page title and item name. In item name we give the product a name for us to identify ie. Alex Lace Dress in Black/Nude, Ivory/Nude, Red/Red In Page Title we use the suppliers name and product code as well as the item name ie. Jadore j8075 Alex Lace Dress Online Australia URL = alex-lace-dress/ Are we using the correct format ? What could we do to improve them?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Internal links are not indexed of the website
Some internal links are indexed and some not of the same page of the website, what is the so and what is the reason behind?
On-Page Optimization | | renukishor10 -
Does Rel=canonical affect google shopping feed?
I have a client who gets a good portion of their sales (~40%) from Google Product Feeds, and for those they want each (Product X Quantity) to have it’s own SKU, as they often get 3 listings in a given Google shopping query, i.e. 2,4,8 units of a given product. However, we are worried about this creating duplicate content on the search side. Do you know if we could rel=canonical on the site without messing with their google shopping results? The crux of the issue is that they want the products to appear distinct for the product feed, and unified for the web so as not to dilute. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | VISISEEKINC0 -
Googlebot indexing URL's with ? queries in them. Is this Panda duplicate content?
I feel like I'm being damaged by Panda because of duplicate content as I have seen the Googlebot on my site indexing hundreds of URL's with ?fsdgsgs strings after the .html. They were beign generated by an add-on filtering module on my store, which I have since turned off. Googlebot is still indexing them hours later. At a loss what to do. Since Panda, I have lost a couple of dozen #1 rankings that I've held for months on end and had one drop over 100 positions.
On-Page Optimization | | sparrowdog0 -
Canonical rel
I am having a few issues understanding the whole report card and canonical issue. I have a wordpress blog www.theseolab.com.au. When i created the blog i had setup http://theseolab.com.au and i thought that was my mistake. When i ran the on page report for www.theseolab.com.au . It said that my canonical was http://theseolab.com. So i changed it and my canonical points to http://www.theseolab.com.au. 5 days later i run the on page again and it still says that there are issues and it still shows that my website canonical is not pointing to the right link. Does it take time to update or am i missing something?
On-Page Optimization | | theseolab0 -
Sitemap.xml parameters
Hello, I confused about the parameters when create sitemap.xml. I don'n know how to use these parameters efficiently. Some parameters are:
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh
- **Page changing frequency: **what is a good value? Can I choose "None"?
- **Last modified date: **what is a good value? Can I choose "Don’t specify"?
- **Page priority: **what is a good value? Can I choose "Don’t specify"? Thanks,0 -
URL contain special character
Hello, I am using URLs which contain special character such as ', ". I found in the Google Webmaster Tool report errors related URL contain ' character. Google have indexed partial URL from beginning to ' character and cut off the rest of URL. For example: I submitted URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp'-test-page.html, then google report error NOT FOUND for URL www.example.com/vietnam-visa-corp I don't know why and how to fix it? Please help! Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh1 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0