Please let me know if I am in a right direction with fixing rel="canonical" issue?
-
While doing my website crawl, I keep getting the message that I have tons of duplicated pages.
http://example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php are considered to be the duplicates. As I figured out this one: http://example.com/index.php is a canonical page, and I should point out this one: http://www.example.com/index.php to it. Could you please let me know if I will do a right thing if I put this piece of code into my index.php file?
? Or I should use this one: -
This type of duplicate applies to far more than just the homepage...so by implementing a single redirect rule, you handle this type of duplicate for every single URL on your site, and neither people nor search engines will ever see the undesired version.
If you do this via canonical tags, you have to include the canonical tag on every page, which could be very time consuming depending on how large your site is.
-
Thank you, will do!
-
Thanks for your reply, Logan. Why exactly 301 redirect is better than handling this with canonical tags? Canonical tags wouldn't take so much time, would they?
-
As Logan said, you'd be better served handling these with 301 redirects. But you will also want to go in Google Search Console/Webmaster tools into Site Settings and set your preferred domain to either WWW on Non-WWW (depending on which you prefer to show across your site).
-
Hi,
Ideally, you would handle www and nonwww duplication by way of a redirect rule. Both versions of that URL should not render, i.e. when you go to www.example.com it should take you straight over to example.com.
You can handle this with canonical tags the way you've proposed, the URL in the href element should be the one you prefer. However, this should be reserved only as a work-around in the event that you can't get implement a server-side redirect rule to handle ALL www-to-nonwww issues.
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
-
Should I keep writing about the same using rel canonical?
Hi, The service we provide has not so many searches per month. A long tail keyword that describes the service well has at the most 400 searches per month. We wrote a post for this keyword and we ranked number 1 for many months. Now we're on page 2 and I the truth is we stopped writing blog posts because we were raking well for our best keywords. I added a few new posts and lost ranking on my top keywords so I gave up, deleted them and recover the rankings for the keywords I wanted the most. The problem is that I have lost these positions and I know we're supposed to be updating the blog regularly. What would you suggest? Should we keep writing about the same thing and use rel canonical? There aren't that many keywords related to what we offer. I appreciate any ideas.
Technical SEO | | Naix0 -
Our rankings for "Tree Service" dropped last month
Hi, we've had a page www.savatree.com/tree-service.html which was ranking top 1-12 on the google rankings but has complete dropped out. We don't have any duplicate errors from that page on here. Do you have any suggestions? We do rank highly on Bing and Yahoo (1-2 pages). We can't figure whats going on.
Technical SEO | | SavATree0 -
My sites "pages indexed by Google" have gone up more than qten-fold.
Prior to doing a little work cleaning up broken links and keyword stuffing Google only indexed 23/333 pages. I realize it may not be because of the work but now we have around 300/333. My question is is this a big deal? cheers,
Technical SEO | | Billboard20120 -
If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page? As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
Technical SEO | | watchcases0 -
Javascript or HTML / DIVS to fix pagination issues?
Which is better to fix a pagination problem, javascript or HTML/DIVs? I know in one Google Webmaster Forum, a Google engineer recommends Javascript, but I've also seen people use DIVs.
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
"Site Suspended" in Google Adwords + Lost all rankings in Google => is this related?
Can anyone share thoughts on this: Does the S recently (mid april) we revamped our website (same content, new layout, strong brand), but a few days later our google rep contacted us to tell that she got a "red flag" for one of our SEA campaigns (we broke the bridge page policy, not on purpose to be clear), they were completely correct on this matter. We even got some extra time to correct this, normal policy is only 10 days. But, we were a little slow, so all our Adwords Campaigns are suspended and we get the message "Site suspended". We are working to have this fixed, our Google rep even granted some more time to fix this. Now, almost simultaneously, same time frame, all our new pages, that were already ranking well tx to proper 301 rules, suddenly fell out of the google SERPS, nothing to be found anymore up till now. Our website is live since 1996, no issues, up till now. There seems to be a strong correlation to what happened in our SEA and what happened in our SEO can anyone share some info?
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
How I implement the cross domain rel canonical?
I just watched the WBF on cross domain rel canonicals. I understand the concept, but not sure how I go about actually doing the rel canonical? If I have www.mysite.com and someone we just partnered with, www.othersite.com wants to create new pages and use my content, what will the rel canonical tag look like on www.othersite.com? Do I need to also put this tag on www.mysite.com? I want to make sure each of my pages that the other site is copying is getting the "SEO credit."
Technical SEO | | NueMD0 -
Rel canonical or 301 the Index Page?
Still a bit confused on best practice for /index.php showing up as duplicate for www.mysite.com. What do I need to do and How?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110