Proper use and coding of rel = "canonical" tag
-
I'm working on a site that has pages for many wedding vendors. There are essentially 3 variations of the page for each vendor with only slightly different content, so they're showing up as "duplicate content" in my SEOmoz Campaign. Here's an example of the 3 variations:
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=messageWrite
http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm?vendorID=4161&action=writeReview
Because of this, we placed a rel="canoncial" tag in the second 2 pages to try to fix the problem. However, the coding does not seem to validate in the w3 html validator. I can't say I understand html well enough to understand the error the validator is pointing out.
We also added a the following to the second 2 types of pages
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
Am I employing this tag correctly in this case? Here is a snippet of the code below.
<html> <head> <title>Reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MAtitle> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="[/includes/style.css](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/includes/style.css)"> <link href="[http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161](view-source:http://www.weddingreportsma.com/MA-wedding.cfm/vendorID/4161)" rel="canonical" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta name="keywords" content="Astonishing Event, Inc, Somerset Massachusetts, Massachusetts Wedding Wedding Planners Directory, Massachusetts weddings, wedding Massachusetts ">
<meta name="description" content="Get information and read reviews on Astonishing Event, Inc from Somerset MA. Astonishing Event, Inc appears in the directory of Somerset MA wedding Wedding Planners on WeddingReportsMA.com."><script src="[http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js](view-source:http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js)" type="text/javascript">script> <script type="text/javascript"> _uacct = "UA-173959-2"; urchinTracker(); script>
head>
-
Thanks for your help, I get it now!
In addition to your video, I also found a post on Matt Cutts' blog that answers it:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
-
No, if you remove it page will not show up as canonical element indicates to google that you do not want the page it is paleced on to rank, but it is still able to pass link juice. It is like a 301 redirect, with the difference that users are still able to read the pae content on the sepcific url. Here's a video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM
-
Are you saying that I should remove the robots noindex tag altogether? If I do that, the pages with the canonical code will still show up in G, right?
If yes, Is there any alterative if I don't want that to happen?
Thanks for the help!
-
The canonical code is ok, but the with robots noindex it won't work. You cannot redirect something that is not indexed. Move robots tag and you shall be fine.
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
-
Hreflang and canonical tag for new country specific website - different base domain
I have a little different situation compared to most other questions which asks for hreflang and canonical tags for country specific version of websites. This is an SEO related question and I was hoping to get some insight on your recommendations. We have an existing Australian website - say - ausnight.com.au now we want to launch a UK version of this website - the domain is - uknight.co.uk please note, we are not only changing from .com.au to .co.uk.... but the base domain name as well changed - from ausnight to uknight as you can understand, the audience for both websites is different. Both websites has most pages same with same contents.... the questions I have is - Should we put canonical tag on the new website pages? If we don't put canon tag on new website pages, what is the impact on the SEO ranking of current website? I believe we need to put hreflang tag on both websites to tell google that we have another language version (en-au vs en-gb) of the same page. Is this correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TinoSharp0 -
Is this the correct way of using rel canonical, next and prev for paginated content?
Hello Moz fellows, a while ago (3-4 years ago) we setup our e-commerce website category pages to apply what Google suggested to correctly handle pagination. We added rel "canonicals", rel "next" and "prev" as follows: On page 1: On page 2: On page 3: And so on, until the last page is reached: Do you think everything we have been doing is correct? I have doubts on the way we have handled the canonical tag, so, any help to confirm that is very appreciated! Thank you in advance to everyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Rel=dofollow and rel=nofollow
Hi, I found a link pointing to my client's site that looks like this: <a <span="" class="html-tag">href</a><a <span="" class="html-tag">="</a>http://www.clientsite.com" rel="dofollow" target="_blank" rel='nofollow'>Anchor text Could someone tell me if this links acts as a dofollow or as a nofollow? It's the first time I see such a link and I don't know how to handle it. Best regards, Edimar
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Noriel0 -
Canonicle & rel=NOINDEX used on the same page?
I have a real estate company: www.company.com with approximately 400 agents. When an agent gets hired we allow them to pick a URL which we then register and manage. For example: www.AGENT1.com We then take this agent domain and 301 redirect it to a subdomain of our main site. For example
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet
Agent1.com 301’s to agent1.company.com We have each page on the agent subdomain canonicled back to the corresponding page on www.company.com
For example: agent1.company.com canonicles to www.company.com What happened is that google indexed many URLS on the subdomains, and it seemed like Google ignored the canonical in many cases. Although these URLS were being crawled and indexed by google, I never noticed any of them rank in the results. My theory is that Google crawled the subdomain first, indexed the page, and then later Google crawled the main URL. At that point in time, the two pages actually looked quite different from one another so Google did not recognize/honor the canonical. For example:
Agent1.company.com/category1 gets crawled on day 1
Company.com/category1 gets crawled 5 days later The content (recently listed properties for sale) on these category pages changes every day. If Google crawled the pages (both the subdomain and the main domain) on the same day, the content on the subdomain and the main domain would look identical. If the urls are crawled on different days, the content will not match. We had some major issues (duplicate content and site speed) on our www.company.com site that needed immediate attention. We knew we had an issue with the agent subdomains and decided to block the crawling of the subdomains in the robot.txt file until we got the main site “fixed”. We have seen a small decrease in organic traffic from google to our main site since blocking the crawling of the subdomains. Whereas with Bing our traffic has dropped almost 80%. After a couple months, we have now got our main site mostly “fixed” and I want to figure out how to handle the subdomains in order to regain the lost organic traffic. My theory is that these subdomains have a some link juice that is basically being wasted with the implementation of the robots.txt file on the subdomains. Here is my question
If we put a ROBOTS rel=NOINDEX on all pages of the subdomains and leave the canonical (to the corresponding page of the company site) in place on each of those pages, will link juice flow to the canonical version? Basically I want the link juice from the subdomains to pass to our main site but do not want the pages to be competing for a spot in the search results with our main site. Another thought I had was to place the NOIndex tag only on the category pages (the ones that seem to change every day) and leave it off the product (property detail pages, pages that rarely ever change). Thank you in advance for any insight.0 -
"Leeching" backlinks...yes or no?
A lot of websites, by virtue of practicality, will link to wikipedia articles to explain certain concepts. Would it be worthwhile to reach out to those websites and ask them to change the link to a different resource if that resource is a much better alternative than the wikipedia article? And how would you approach this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mack-ayache0 -
Error: Missing required field "updated"
In my WordPress blog, there are pages for tags,categories,... like : https://www.abc.com/blog/category/how-to-cook-something/ On these pages I am getting the following error: Error: Missing required field "updated" So far I have 39 if these errors. Please let me know if this is an important issue to pay attention to? If yes, how I can fix it? Thanks Everyone
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
REL canonicals not fixing duplicate issue
I have a ton of querystrings in one of the apps on my site as well as pagination - both of which caused a lot of Duplicate errors on my site. I added rel canonicals as a php condition so every time a specific string (which only exists in these pages) occurs. The rel canonical notification shows up in my campaign now, but all of the duplicate errors are still there. Did I do it right and just need to ignore the duplicate errors? Is there further action to be taken? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Canonical vs noindex for blog tags
Our blog started to user tags & I know this is bad for Panda, but our product team wants use them for user experience. Should we canonizalize these tags to the original blog URL or noindex them?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0