Rel=Canonical URLs?
-
If I had two pages:
PageA about Cats
PageB about Dogs
If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
-
I don't know on that. This is an older question -- you might try asking this as a separate new question, where more people will see it.
-
would Google ignore your canonical tag in totality or for only the pages implemented incorrectly?
-
rel=canonical is one of the things google will not always follow, if they think it may be implemented wrong. Barry Schwartz reported from SMX West on a slightly different question about implementation (paginated results) at http://www.seroundtable.com/seo-canonical-pagination-13094.html. The following excerpt should apply to your situation (emphasis mine). I have seen other reports too where Google has determined that canonical wasn't implemented correctly and ignored the instruction.
Not only that, if you do, Google may ignore it because Google uses methods to determine if the canonical tag command is actually something valid for that case. So if you canonical page 2 to page 1 and page 2 is not similar enough to page 1, Google may ignore your canonical tag.
-
I'm trying to understand the deep context of how Google (and others) treat rel=canonical tags.
There are a few situations that becomes relevant to understand how it works (rather than just code and pray):
- If we are 301 redirecting PageA, but PageB still has rel=canonical of the URL of PageA, will Google still have PageA as its index? One reason may be, the URL of PageA is more attractive (URL friendly).
- We want to know the "delta" of how much content does Google determine as "duplicate content" when Google chooses to use the rel=canonical instead of the natural URL. I'm suspecting that people may be abusing this, creating a hundred variation of the same page but using one rel=canonical.
- Some of our 301 redirect work is affected by this because the client doesn't want the new URLs indexed yet.
- Some legacy CMS tracking/systems that generates funny URLs (it increments each time you make an edit. So a url like PageA.php becomes PageA.php?version=2, this drives us nuts) is causing a lot of duplicate content - but their CMS sometimes does some wacky 301 forwards. We need a temporary solution until we can fix the programming logic of the CMS.
-
is there any particular reason do you want to accomplish it? Can you please tell us what are you trying to achieve.
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 indexed but not submitted in sitemap, however the URL is in the sitemap
Dear Community, I have the following problem and would be super helpful if you guys would be able to help. Cheers Symptoms : On the search console, Google says that some of our old URLs are indexed but not submitted in sitemap However, those URLs are in the sitemap Also the sitemap as been successfully submitted. No error message Potential explanation : We have an automatic cache clearing process within the company once a day. In the sitemap, we use this as last modification date. Let's imagine url www.example.com/hello was modified last time in 2017. But because the cache is cleared daily, in the sitemap we will have last modified : yesterday, even if the content of the page did not changed since 2017. We have a Z after sitemap time, can it be that the bot does not understands the time format ? We have in the sitemap only http URL. And our HTTPS URLs are not in the sitemap What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ZozoMe0 -
URL Injection Hack - What to do with spammy URLs that keep appearing in Google's index?
A website was hacked (URL injection) but the malicious code has been cleaned up and removed from all pages. However, whenever we run a site:domain.com in Google, we keep finding more spammy URLs from the hack. They all lead to a 404 error page since the hack was cleaned up in the code. We have been using the Google WMT Remove URLs tool to have these spammy URLs removed from Google's index but new URLs keep appearing every day. We looked at the cache dates on these URLs and they are vary in dates but none are recent and most are from a month ago when the initial hack occurred. My question is...should we continue to check the index every day and keep submitting these URLs to be removed manually? Or since they all lead to a 404 page will Google eventually remove these spammy URLs from the index automatically? Thanks in advance Moz community for your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
URL categorization / subfolders
Hi Mozzers, We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be. A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French. Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with. Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best? /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present) /france/holidays/activity/ (always have a first subfolder with the word france) /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder) /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder) /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/) /French-holidays/activity/ My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector. Thanks in advance! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs
Hello all. I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's. Using Magento Platform. site.com/category1/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
site.com/category2/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/ ( this is where other categories link to ) Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 which takes care of duplicate content correctly. I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ ) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Rel="canonical" questions?
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Pagination Question: Google's 'rel=prev & rel=next' vs Javascript Re-fresh
We currently have all content on one URL and use # and Javascript refresh to paginate pages, and we are wondering if we transition to the Google's recommended pagination if we will see an improvement in traffic. Has anyone gone though a similar transition? What was the result? Did you see an improvement in traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Canonical and optimization
Hi, I was thinking: If I had 4 pages, each of them optimized for an especific keyword, but set a canonical url to another page, would this another page rank for the 5 specific keywords? Ex: Page 1- Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroVillalobos
Page 2- Snickers
Page 3- Socks
Page 4- Feet
All set the canonical url to Page 5 Page 5 will rank for all this four keywords?0