Canonical Tag - Question
-
Hey,
I will give a thumbs up and best answer to whoever answers my question correctly.
The Canonical Tag is supposed to solve Duplication which is fine.
My questions are:
-
Does the Canonical Tag make the PR / Link Juice flow differently? If I have john.long.com/home and john.long.com but put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/home reading john.long.com then what does this do? Does it flow the Link Equity back to john.long.com?
-
Can you use the Canonical Tag to change PR flow in any means? If I had john.long.com/washing-machines and john.long.com/kids-toys...
If I put a Canonical Tag on john.long.com/kids-toys reading john.long.com/washing-machines then would the PR from /kids-toys flow to /washing-machines or would Google just ignore this? (The pages are completely different in this example and content is completely different).
Thank you.
-
-
Yannick is correct.
Bing for example will lose trust in your site and start to ignore your tags if you are not honest.
Bing has also stated that a canonical is much like a 301, only it leaves the useer on the page, it does not redirect. So yes it will leak a bit of link juice.
Read the link yannick supplied, it explains it all.
-
"Would Google just ignore these"
The canonical tag is merely a reference for Google, and any other crawlers that respect this tag, and in no way does Google have to honour it. I'm quite certain if your canonical tag reference was different than the actual URL in question over a large chunk of your site, Google might start to think something is up.
The canonical tag works like a 301 header redirect. So, it will pass some juice, but not 100% of the PR juice.
I could go on more, but there are several answers below that have already pointed out some great points.
-
To answer this questions needed to understand why google have implement "canonical" tag.
Before, to determine is content duplicated or not. Google bot downloaded page content and via complex algorithm compare it with other page in index. As i think there are special bot running through indexed pages database and searching duplicates (that's why copy-paste sites take ban not right after indexation but in some time after).
Tag "Canonical" make this task more easier, Google bot don't need to download page with duplicate content, just need to check section, and may be hash or something like "hashsumm" for . So there are no necessity to download and store same data few times(delete stored data is hard for high-load data centers). It's more effective and fast way to crawl large data sets like web. Also link and url related data, i think, should be added to primary page data set.
I've made a test on this, Google download much less data if the page has rel="canonical" to other page, compare to primary page.
So according this answers for your questions are:
1. Link just flow as usual's, all link data for duplicated pages merge with data for primary page. So PR may slightly decrease in some cases,by the way if you have links from same pages to both primary and duplicated pages. But impact is not critical, almost similar to 301.
2. No, because Google bot check not only canonical. About this i have one more point, Google is statistical SE, and rate pages on topics, so in you case even if canonical will added to pages, it will not help you rank better for both terms.
-
1. I think a canonical loses a similar amount of link juice as a 301 redirect would, so 100% of the juice would not flow back to john.long.com
2. If Google sees the canonical link is different to the content of the page it is on, Google will ignore it - Matt Cutts has said as much.
Check this out: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/
-
-
Thanks for your reply Yannick. It's much appreciated.
I don't find you very convincing though.
I'll give you a thumbs up but I need somebody else to answer please.
-
In my opinion, if you are pointing to a page as a canonical and the page you are pointing to is not a copy of the page the tag is on, you'll be sending strange signals to SE's and they will ignore it. Worst case they will penalize you. (But I dont think they do that)
-
But my question is and what I'm trying to understand is that - IF it does flow Link Equity like you said it does, then what is to stop somebody putting Canonical Tags into Internal Pages pointing back to their Homepage to channel Link Equity from Internal Pages back to their Homepage for example????? Would Google just ignore these or penalise you because will Google know that the content isn't the same?
-
1. In my understanding: it flows link equity back to john.long.com if it is a copy of /home.
2. It's not as simple as that. Try not to compare a canonical to a 301. rel canonical tells SE's that there is a copy of the page somewhere else. So putting a rel canonical on the kids toys to the washing machines will do nothing for your rankings. They are not copies of eachother.
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
-
Rel=canonical Question
Alright, so let's say we've got an event coming up. The URL is website.com/event. On that page, you can access very small pages with small amounts of information, like website.com/event/register, website.com/event/hotel-info, and website.com/event/schedule. These originally came up as having missing meta descriptions, and I was thinking a rel=canonical might be the best approach, but I'm not sure. What do you think? Is there a better approach? Should I have just added a meta description and moved on?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MWillner0 -
Sitemap and content question
This is our primary sitemap https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml We have a about 750 location based URL's that aren't currently linked anywhere on the site. https://www.samhillbands.com/sitemaps/locations.xml Google is indexing most of the URL because we submitted the locations sitemap directly for indexing. Thoughts on that? Should we just create a page that contains all of the location links and make it live on the site? Should we remove the locations sitemap from separate indexing...because of duplicate content? # Sitemap Type Processed Issues Items Submitted Indexed --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- 1 /sitemaps/locations.xml Sitemap May 10, 2016 - Web 771 648 2 /sitemaps/sitemap.xml Sitemap index May 8, 2016 - Web 862 730
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Pixel tags impact on SEO?
I was asked by our IT if switching to a tag management company that removes the pixels from our site and is replaced by a javascript would have a negative impact on SEO. I have not been able to find anything that discusses this: Does anyone have experience with this? Has it caused any issues? Has it caused any issues? How do crawlers see pixel data, and what do they do with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn_Huber0 -
Do I put a canonical tag on the page I am pointing to?
Lets say B i a duplicate page of A (main page). I understand I have to put canonical tag under B to point to A. Do I also put canonical tag under the main page A? Is it necessary? I understand that A would then tell Google that it is preferred page of A? Is this a correct understanding?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andypatalak0 -
Rel Canonical attribute order
So the position of the attribute effect the rel canonical tags' ability to function? is the way I see it across multiple documents and websites. Having a discussion with someone in the office and there is a website with it set up as: Will that cause any problems? The website is inquestion still has both pages indexed within Google using the SITE:domain.com/product as well as SITE:domain.com/category/product
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Link Building Question
Hey Moz'ers, I have created several blogs on different domains for the purpose of writing good content articles that contain 2-3 links per article that go back to my website. It has been up for about 3-4 weeks. I am not seeing my results/links showing up in OSE, is this because it still needs more time or is there something else I could be advised to look into? In theory these blogs will only contain 2-3 links from each domain to the site. I was also going to make sure the anchor text per link is different (keyword, brand name, random anchor like click here). Side note: How does this system sound as part of one small aspect to link building? red flags? Thanks for all the responses and advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Canonical Issue need hep
Hi Is my site has any issue with duplicate pages within the site , have i define my canonical tag properly , can any one advise please help. childrensfunkyfurniture.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
SEOMOZ Diagram question
Hi, On this SEOMOZ help page (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link) the diagram explaining the optimal link structure (image also attached) has me a little confused. From the homepage, if the bot crawls down the right-hand link first, will it not just hit a dead end where it cant crawl any further and disappear? OR... will it hit the end of the structure and then crawl backwards to the homepage again and follow down another link and then just repeat the process until all pages are indexed? Cheers pyramid.jpg
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0