URL query strings and canonical tag
-
Hi,
I have recently been getting my comparison website redesigned and developed onto wordpress and the site is now 90% complete. Part of the redesign has meant that there are now dynamic urls in the format:
http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10
I have other pages similar to this but with different content for the different price ranges and these are linked to from the menus:
http://www.mywebsite.com/20-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=20
Now my questions are:
1. I am using Joost's All-in-one SEO plugin and this adds a canonical tag to the page that is pointing to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/ which is the permalink. Is this OK as it is or should i change this to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=10
2. Which URL will get indexed, what gets shown as the display URL in the SERPs and what page will users land on? I'm a bit confused so apologies if these seem like silly questions.
Thanks
-
Thanks for your response Tom.
Essentially there is only one query string variation that is live and linked to for the 10 pounds url.
/10-pounds-products/ => /10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10
The text content is identical on both URLs however the query results are obviously different.
I don't think there is a way to remove the canonical tag aside from removing the plugin so I may have to go with changing it to the query string.
Ideally I would like for users to see the non-query version in the SERPs and the click through to the the query version of the page. Not sure that's possible now though I will speak to the developer to see if this issue is avoidable.
Thanks again
Rosh
-
If each URL with a different query string displays different information then they are effectively different pages, regardless of whether they're based on the same page framework or not (in this case /10-pounds-products/) - you only need to use a blanket canonical tag like the one' Joost's plugin gives if you want all these pages to be considered the same thing.
If you would like these pages to appear in the SERPs then you should absolutely NOT have a canonical tag telling Google all query string versions of /10-pounds-products/ are the same - not least because it's not true.
In answer to your questions -
1. If you can change it to make whatever query string version you're viewing the canonical URL then do so otherwise I would remove it completely.
2.if you keep the canonical tag then only /10-pounds-products/ will be listed in the SERPs
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
-
International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help. We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us. Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page? So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different? Example: General page: www.example.com/estate-car US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon Hreflang tags: Would that be the correct implementation? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Changing Urls
Hi All, I have a question I hope someone can help me with. I ran a scan on a website and it has a stack of urls that are far too long. I am going through and changing the urls to shorter ones. But my question is regarding redirections. Wordpress seems to be automatically redirecting the old urls to the new ones, should i be adding a more solid 301 in as well or is the wordpress redirect enough? I ask as they dont all seem to stay redirecting Thanks in advance for the help
Technical SEO | | DaleZon2 -
Friendly URL
Can be Friendly URL installed on a custom made jobsite using mod rewrite / apache without any big interference to the system itself? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | tomaz770 -
Logos and H1 Tags
Would you ever wrap a Logo in an H1 tag? The logo is an image, but is in an area that would cause it to make the most sense when forming my page into a proper hierarchy format. Thanks in advance for any help!
Technical SEO | | smilingbunny0 -
Technical question about site structure using a CMS, redirects, and canonical tag
I have a couple of sites using a particular CMS that creates all of the pages under a content folder, including the home page. So the url is www.example.com/content/default.asp. There is a default.asp in the root directory that redirects to the default page in the content folder using a response.redirect statement and it’s considered a 302 redirect. So all incoming urls, i.e. www.example.com and example.com and www.example.com/ will go to the default.asp which then redirects to www.example.com/ content/default.asp. How does this affect SEO? Should the redirect be a 301? And whether it’s a 301 or a 302, can we have a rel=canonical tag on the page that that is rel=www.example.com? Or does that create some sort of loop? I’ve inherited several sites that use this CMS and need to figure out the best way to handle it.
Technical SEO | | CHutchins1 -
Ignore Urls with pattern.
I have 7000 warnings of urls because of a 302 redirect. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/215/44060409.png/ I want to get rid of those, is it possible to get rid of the Urls with robots.txt. For example that it does not crawl anything that has /product_compare/ in its url? Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Permanent 301 redirects vs canonical urls?
Im moving a website that was .php to wordpress with a few static HTML pages. Which is better use permanent 301 redirects and delte the old pages, leave the old pages and use canonical urls and 301 redirects or something else?
Technical SEO | | senith0 -
Blog URLs
I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70