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
-
Automatically check if URL has been optimised?
Hi guys, I have a massive list of URLs and want to check if the primary keyword for each URL has been optimised. I'm looking for something similar to Moz on-page grader which grades the URL and primary keyword with a single metric e.g. grade a, b, c However, Moz doesn't offer an API to pull this score automatically. I was wondering does anyone know of any tools which you can access their API to do something like this? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?
Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but 301 re-direct to the preferred URL. Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
I currently have a canonical tag pointing to a different url for single page categories on eCommerce site. Is this wrong ?
Hi Mozzers, I have a query regarding canonical tags on my eCommerce site.. Basically on my category pages whereby I have more than 1 page, I currently use next/prev rel and also have a canonical tag pointing to the View all version of that page. This is believe is correct.(see example - http://goo.gl/2gz6LV However, from looking at the view source on my other pages, I have noticed I have canonical tags on all my category pages which are only a single page and these canonicaltag are pointing to a different url. I enclose an example . Please advise Category page - http://goo.gl/Pk4zYl This is where the canonical tag points to - http://goo.gl/EwKv26 Another example Category Page - http://goo.gl/4gWTdD This is where the canonical tag for that page points to http://goo.gl/qm4HV7 Should I either make sure that categories that are only 1 page , don't have a canonical tag at all ? or do I have a canonical tag on say every page on my website for safety pointing to the main url for that page. The later, I imagine would be a belt and braces approach but I don't want to screw up anything if it's not advised? Please help/ Kind regards Pete
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Rel=Canonical - needed if part duplication?
Hi Im looking at a site with multiple products available in multiple languages. Some of the languages are not complete, so where the product description is not available in that language the new page, with its own url in the other languages may take the English version. However, this description is perhaps 200 words long only, and after the description are a host of other products displays within that category. So say for example we were selling glasses, there is a 200 word description about glasses (this is the part that is being copied across the languages) and then 10 products underneath that are translated. So the pages are somewhat different but this 200 word description is copied thru different versions of our site. Currently, the english version is not rel=canonical, would it be better to add the english version where we lack a description and do the canonical option or in fact better to leave it blank until we have a translated description? As its only part of the onpage wording, would this 200 word subsection cause us duplication issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
Rel Alternate tag and canonical tag implementation question
Hello, I have a question about the correct way to implement the canoncial and alternate tags for a site supporting multiple languages and markets. Here's our setup. We have 3 sites, each serving a specific region, and each available in 3 languages. www.example.com : serves the US, default language is English www.example.ca : serves Canada, default language is English www.example.com.mx : serves Mexico, default language is Spanish In addition, each sites can be viewed in English, French or Spanish, by adding a language specific sub-directory prefix ( /fr , /en, /es). The implementation of the alternate tag is fairly straightforward. For the homepage, on www.example.com, it would be: -MX” href=“http://www.example.com.mx/index.html” /> -MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/fr/index.html“ />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amiee
-MX” href=”http://www.example.com.mx/en/index.html“ />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/fr/index.html” />
-US” href=”http://www.example.com/es/index.html“ />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/fr/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/index.html” />
-CA” href=”http://www.example.ca/es/index.html” /> My question is about the implementation of the canonical tag. Currently, each domain has its own canonical tag, as follows: rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/index.html"> <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.ca="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
<link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com.mx="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> I am now wondering is I should set the canonical tag for all my domains to: <link rel="canonical" href="http: www.example.com="" index.html"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:> This is what seems to be suggested on this example from the Google help center. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 What do you think?0 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1 -
Use rel=canonical to save otherwise squandered link juice?
Oftentimes my site has content which I'm not really interested in having included in search engine results. Examples might be a "view cart" or "checkout" page, or old products in the catalog that are no longer available in our system. In the past, I'd blocked those pages from being indexed by using robots.txt or nofollowed links. However, it seems like there is potential link juice that's being lost by removing these from search engine indexes. What if, instead of keeping these pages out of the index completely, I use to reference the home page (http://www.mydomain.com) of the business? That way, even if the pages I don't care about accumulate a few links around the Internet, I'll be capturing the link juice behind the scenes without impacting the customer experience as they browse our site. Is there any downside of doing this, or am I missing any potential reasons why this wouldn't work as expected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cadenzajon1