Multilingual sites: Canonical and Alternate tag implementation question
-
Hello,
I would like some clarification about the correct implementation of the rel="alternate" tag and the canonical tag.
The example given at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 recommends implementing the canonical tag on all region specific sub-domains, and have it point to the www version of the website Here's the example given by Google.
My question is the following. Would this technique also apply if I have region specific sites site local TLD. In other words, if I have www.example.com, www.example.co.uk, www.example.ca – all with the same content in English, but prices and delivery options tailored for US, UK and Canada residents, should I go ahead and implement the canonical tag and alternate tag as follows:
I am a bit concerned about canonicalizing an entire local TLD to the .com site.
-
Since you are using ccTLD's I do not believe you have to use rel=canon to the .com. If you have three distinct sites, the way you have the alternate here is correct. In the .com you would set geotargeting in WMT. Go to site configuration, click settings, choose geographic target and set for the US. This will insure that the .com is for U.S. and prevent confusion since you have the other two ccTLD's.
You won't have duped content issues this way.As to choosing the rel=canon, you could do it each for its own domain, or if you want to share content, etc. you could do a cross domain rel=canon.
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
-
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
Is this all that is needed for a 'canonical' tag?
Hello, I have a Joomla site. I have put in a plugin to make the page source show: eg. <link href="[http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace](view-source:http://www.ditalia.com.au/designer-fabrics-designer-fabric-italian-material-and-french-lace)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" /> Is this all that is need to tell the search engines to ignore the any other links or indexed pages with a url which is created automatically by the system before the SEF urls are initiated?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | infinart0 -
New site now links disappearing in Open Site Explorer and GWT
We launched a new site at the beginning of December 2012 and carefully 301'd all URLs from the old site to the new (custom CMS on old site wordpress on new). Our rankings have slipped quite badly but the most worrying thing is that we used to have about 1200 backlinks according to GWT/OSE before the new site launched and now we're down to about 30. Can anyone help shed some light on this please? The site is www.littleoneslondon.co.uk A few things that might help: 1. We were getting a lot of links through our job feeds (it's a nanny recruitment site) on indeed and trovitt, for some reason no new ones from these have appeared in site explorer and all the old jobs are gone completely. 2. We had 1000s of not found errors in google webmaster tools and once these were redirected and marked as fixed this is when the links disappeared. 3. We are getting quite a few 504 errors on the site due to an old proxy redirect (/blog was hosted on a different server on the old site and has not been removed yet), this will be fixed tomorrow but could this be a factor? 4. The developer seems to have redirected all the links through wordpress directly some how (I don't see any redirect plugins but there are lots of pages called 'redirect'). There are no references in the htaccess file for any redirects other than from the /blog folder that the wordpress instance sits in. Sorry for the long post, I hope I've given any details you'd need and I really appreciate any help anyone can give. Thanks, Karl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bdig0 -
Canonical Tags?
I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content. The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly) are ranking higher than the "good URL" links. So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop. I even read that google might even completely overlook the links. I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions? Thanks, Boo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
2 sites or one sites: 2 locations
Hello, I have a dog training client who is offering services in 2 separate locations. We're looking to be first in the non-local search results and also rank well in google places. Would it be better to go for 2 separate sites or one site and try to rank for 2 different locations with one site? There's both local and standard search results when we type in our keywords. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0 -
H1 Tags
Quick and easy most likely - Just need to clear a few point. I understand each page within the site should only have one H1 tag which should be the most important one. I also believe these only effect google ranking very slightly? right? Currently my CMS is system is pulling the H1 tag in from the page and automatically using the page heading that is on the page IE) the heading used for the content. Should this be a keyword / key phrase instead? and will it be duplicate if i used the same one on various pages in my site? Cheers guys look forward to hearing your feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850