Use Canonical or Robots.txt for Map View URL without Backlink Potential
-
I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions:
-
Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL
-
Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?
-
-
Thank you!
-
Sounds good! Glad to hear you got a solution sorted. Will be interested to hear how it goes.
-
thx for the feedback. I created a "/map/" folder in the URL and added to robots.txt. Again, they are simply a "Map view" option for users and has no or limited unique content, and no plans of changing that since the main page has all the unique content and indexed.
-
Hi there,
Unless the pages contain a lot of crossover duplicate content, there's a good chance Google might ignore the canonical tag anyway:
"One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines."
However, I wouldn't be able to make a strong case for noindexing the pages, unless you're sure they're not adding any value to users. Are these pages discovered by users in organic search (a landing pages report can help you isolate this)? If so, what's the user experience looking like? If users aren't finding their way to this page organically from search or direct (indicating they've bookmarked it), then you potentially could make a case for noindexing them. If they are reaching them as a landing page, you might want to think twice about noindexing.
An alternative would be to build out these pages more, so they standalone as unique, good quality content.
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
-
Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google
I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Google Indexing Duplicate URLs : Ignoring Robots & Canonical Tags
Hi Moz Community, We have the following robots command that should prevent URLs with tracking parameters being indexed. Disallow: /*? We have noticed google has started indexing pages that are using tracking parameters. Example below. http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/furniture/original-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table/1149.html?ec=affee77a60fe4867 These pages are identified as duplicate content yet have the correct canonical tags: https://www.google.co.uk/search?num=100&site=&source=hp&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&oq=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.oakfurnitureland.co.uk%2Ffurniture%2Foriginal-rustic-solid-oak-4-drawer-storage-coffee-table%2F1149.html&gs_l=hp.3..0i10j0l9.4201.5461.0.5879.8.8.0.0.0.0.82.376.7.7.0....0...1c.1.58.hp..3.5.268.0.JTW91YEkjh4 With various affiliate feeds available for our site, we effectively have duplicate versions of every page due to the tracking query that Google seems to be willing to index, ignoring both robots rules & canonical tags. Can anyone shed any light onto the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JBGlobalSEO0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Short Url vs Medium Urls ?
Hello Moooooooooooz ! I got a SEO fight today and though the best would be to involve more people into the fight ! 😛 Do you think it's better to get A- company.com/services/service1.html or B- company/service1.html I was for A as services is also googled to find the service1. I also think that it's better to help google to understand where the service is on the website My friend was for B as URL has to stay as short as possible What do you think ? ps: I can create the URL I want using Joomla and Sh404. The websites has 4 different categoies: /about, /services/ products, /projects Tks ! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
Blocking out specific URLs with robots.txt
I've been trying to block out a few URLs using robots.txt, but I can't seem to get the specific one I'm trying to block. Here is an example. I'm trying to block something.com/cats but not block something.com/cats-and-dogs It seems if it setup my robots.txt as so.. Disallow: /cats It's blocking both urls. When I crawl the site with screaming flog, that Disallow is causing both urls to be blocked. How can I set up my robots.txt to specifically block /cats? I thought it was by doing it the way I was, but that doesn't seem to solve it. Any help is much appreciated, thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whebb0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
Rewriting URL
I'm doing a major URL rewriting on our site to make the URL more SEO friendly as well as more comfortable and intuitive for our users. Our site has a lot of indexed pages, over 250k. So it will take Google a while to reindex everything. I was thinking that when Google Bot encounters the new URLs, it will probably figure out it's duplicate content with the old URL. At least until it recrawls the old URL and get a 301 directing them to the new URL. This will probably lower the ranking of every page being crawled. Am I right to assume this is what will happen? Or is it fine as long as the old URLs get 301 redirect? If it is indeed a problem, what's the best solution? rel="canonical" on every single page maybe? Another approach? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | corwin0 -
Canonicalization issue? - URLs with and without trailing slashes showing up as unique
For some reason, our urls are set to change from “www.apprenda.com/ANYTHING" to “apprenda.com/ANYTHING” These register as different pages though? We have rankings in SEOMoz Pro for terms where our homepage shows up 6th on google, but SEOMoz says it's not on the first page because it's checking against apprenda.com and not www.apprenda.com Also, it seems like for some reason pages with trailing slashes also register differently than those without. Should we be doing something for that? Something to make sure all pages get rewritten to having the trailing slash or not? For instance, this url: http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy/ and this url” http://apprenda.com/saasgrid/features/multi-tenancy are really the same page. Yet in our analytics, they register as different pages with their own stats, etc. What should we do in our particular case, and how can we get this fixed? I really appreciate the help, and thanks in advance! Jesse
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ApprendaPlatform0
