Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
-
Hi Moz Community,
We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below.
www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1
Thanks!
-
Definitely, agree with Robert. You do not need rel=canonical tags on filtered / search views of your content.
After you remove these rel=canonical's, I'd suggest running your site through Screaming Frog's rel=canonical error report to confirm that the rel=canonical issues are fixed.
Hope that helps,
B
-
Hey Zack,
Great question!
The short answer here (to the best of my knowledge) is that canonical tags are utilized for static pages such as your category and product pages. However, dynamic pages (search & filter pages, for example) are not necessary as there are different queries users might input as well as a limitless combination of potential returns, depending on the size of your site.
Frankly, I think that running a tag on each of these pages is a poor use of time compared to ensuring that the pages themselves show up correctly when a user is searching (i.e. this is a site architecture/input return issue more than a canonical tag issue). I'm not saying don't do it, I just don't think you are going to get much from the process.
Tag your static pages, especially for anything unique to your site. Otherwise, I would say move on to bigger fish.
Cheers and hope this helps!
Rob
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
-
Schema markup in tag manager for multiple locations not registering in tester tool or search console
Hi Moz community, I had implemented schema markup for companies with multiple branches. We setup an organization with multiple points of contact tag, a Local Business tag for each branch and tags for specific products/ services - all through Google tag manager. I managed to fix the product markup with a small update to the code I found in a Google forum but have been unable to revive our local business markup. The tags of the schema mark up are active but when I run the Google structured data testing tool it doesn't find any schema tags. We are seeing some of the tags show up in search console but not all of them. Has anyone else had this problem and found a solution? Or, do you have any recommendations on how to markup an organization with multiple branches? Should we have one overall organization tag and a separate one for each business or is there another way of presenting each branch? Appreciate any insight!
Technical SEO | | Alexanders0 -
Website SEO Product Pages - Condense Product Pages
We are managing a website that has seen consistently dropping rankings over the last 2 years (http://www.independence-bunting.com/). Our long term strategy has been purely content-based and is of high quality, but isn’t seeing the desired results. It is an ecommerce site that has a lot of pages, most of which are category or product pages. Many of the product pages have duplicate or thin content, which we currently see as one of the primary reasons for the ranking drops.The website has many individual products which have the same fabric and size options, but have different designs. So it is difficult to write valuable content that differs between several products that have similar designs. Right now each of the different designs has its own product page. We have a dilemma, because our options are:A.Combine similar designs of the product into one product page where the customer must choose a design, a fabric, and a size before checking out. This way we can have valuable content and don’t have to duplicate that content on other pages or try to find more to say about something that there really isn’t anything else to say about. However, this process will remove between 50% and 70% of the pages on the website. We know number of indexed pages is important to search engines and if they suddenly see that half of our pages are gone, we may cause more negative effects despite the fact that we are in fact aiming to provide more value to the user, rather than less.B.Leave the product pages alone and try to write more valuable content for each product page, which will be difficult because there really isn’t that much more to say, or more valuable ways to say it. This is the “safe” option as it means that our negative potential impact is reduced but we won’t necessarily see much positive trending either. C.Test solution A on a small percentage of the product categories to see any impact over the next several months before making sitewide updates to the product pages if we see positive impact, or revert to the old way if we see negative impact.Any sound advice would be of incredible value at this point, as the work we are doing isn’t having the desired effects and we are seeing consistent dropping rankings at this point.Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,
Technical SEO | | Ed-iOVA0 -
Switchboard Tags - Multiple desktop pages pointing to one mobile page
I have recently started to implement switchboard tags to connect our mobile and desktop pages, and to ensure that our mobile pages show up in rankings for mobile users. Because our desktop site is much deeper in content than our mobile site, there are a number of desktop pages we would like to have point to one mobile page. However, with the switchboard tags, this poses a problem because it requires multiple rel=canonical tags to be placed on the one mobile page. I'm assuming this will either confuse the search engines, or they will choose to ignore the rel=canonical tag altogether. Any ideas on how to approach this situation other than creating an equivalent mobile version of every desktop page or implementing a user agent detection redirect?
Technical SEO | | JBlank0 -
Skip indexing the search pages
Hi, I want all such search pages skipped from indexing www.somesite.com/search/node/ So i have this in robots.txt (Disallow: /search/) Now any posts that start with search are being blocked and in Google i see this message A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more. How can i handle this and also how can i find all URL's that Google is blocking from showing Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Two different canonical tags on one page
Due to an error, some of my pages now have two canonical tags on them. One is correct and the other goes to a nonsense URL (404 page). I know I should ideally remove the incorrect ones, but it's a big manual job. Are they doing any harm? Can I just leave them there and let Google figure it out? The correct ones are higher up in the code. Will this make a difference? Any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | ShearingsGroup0 -
Should I allow index of category / tag pages on Wordpress?
Quite simply, is it best to allow index of category / tag pages on a Wordpress blog or no index them? My thought is Google will / might see it as duplicate content? Thanks, K
Technical SEO | | SEOKeith0 -
Tags causing Duplicate page content?
I was looking through the 'Duplicate Page Content' and Too Many On-Page Link' errors and they all seem to be linked to the 'Tags' on my blog pages. Is this really a problem and if so how should I be using tags properly to get the best SEO rewards?
Technical SEO | | zapprabbit1 -
Should I Block Tag, Category, Author Pages
Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on. The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?
Technical SEO | | Falconberg0