Will rel=canonical cause a page to be indexed?
-
Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content:
One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage
This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.)
http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
-
Read your additional comment (to @Highland). If you canonical from a known page (indexed and linked to, internally and/or externally) to an unknown page with no links, it would act a bit like a 301-redirect, in theory. The target page (of the canonical) would start ranking as if it were the source page.
The problem is that that page isn't really canonical. You have a tag saying "This is the page" but every single other cue (internal links, inbound links, etc.) says that the non-canonical page is really canonical. In other words, your canonical tag says the opposite of everything else you're saying. That's generally not a good situation. If you want a page to be canonical, treat it that way. Sending Google mixed signals can get messy fast.
-
Why would you point rel canonical to a page you don't want to rank?
-
I probably phrased poorly...simpler question: If there is a page that nobody knows about, it hasn't been submitted, there are no links to it...the only way the outside world would ever know it exists is if they looked at a rel="canonical" tag...will google follow that canonical tag and index it?
-
I actually have a completely different experience. Within the same domain, not between 2 domains. Lets say my page is http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-1.html http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-2.html http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-3.html Each of them is actually http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html So each of the above pages (all 4) contain a canonical tag to the original page http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html What happens is when I check in the SERPS, nothing except http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html show up doing site: checks. However, if I do a cache: for any of the 4 pages, the http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html shows up. So Google identifies each of the URLs, but only returns http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html in my case.
-
Canonical doesn't prevent a page from being indexed. Canonical allows you, the end user, to specify which of your duplicate pages to treat as the real page. Otherwise Google will pick one. The page still is in the index and is still crawled, it's just ignored for ranking purposes.
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
-
Over 500 thin URLs indexed from dynamically created pages (for lightboxes)
I have a client who has a resources section. This section is primarily devoted to definitions of terms in the industry. These definitions appear in colored boxes that, when you click on them, turn into a lightbox with their own unique URL. Example URL: /resources/?resource=dlna The information for these lightboxes is pulled from a standard page: /resources/dlna. Both are indexed, resulting in over 500 indexed pages that are either a simple lightbox or a full page with very minimal content. My question is this: Should they be de-indexed? Another option I'm knocking around is working with the client to create Skyscraper pages, but this is obviously a massive undertaking given how many they have. Would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Joomla creating duplicate pages, then the duplicate page's canonical points to itself - help!
Using Joomla, every time I create an article a subsequent duplicate page is create, such as: /latest-news/218-image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface and /component/content/article?id=218:image-stabilization-task-used-to-develop-robot-brain-interface The latter being the duplicate. This wouldn't be too much of a problem, but the canonical tag on the duplicate is pointing to itself.. creating mayhem in Moz and Webmaster tools. We have hundreds of duplicates across our website and I'm very concerned with the impact this is having on our SEO! I've tried plugins such as sh404SEF and Styleware extensions, however to no avail. Can anyone help or know of any plugins to fix the canonicals?
Technical SEO | | JamesPearce0 -
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
Hi all & happy new near! I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice: I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern: Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp. I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
Technical SEO | | AlexSG
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locations Any opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa? I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot! Best regards from Singapore!0 -
Pages to be indexed in Google
Hi, We have 70K posts in our site but Google has scanned 500K pages and these extra pages are category pages or User profile pages. Each category has a page and each user has a page. When we have 90K users so Google has indexed 90K pages of users alone. My question is. Should we leave it as they are or should we block them from being indexed? As we get unwanted landings to the pages and huge bounce rate. If we need to remove what needs to be done? Robots block or Noindex/Nofollow Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
How to stop my webmail pages not to be indexed on Google ??
when i did a search in google for Site:mywebsite.com , for a list of pages indexed. Surprisingly the following come up " Webmail - Login " Although this is associated with the domain , this is a completely different server , this the rackspace email server browser interface I am sure that there is nothing on the website that links or points to this.
Technical SEO | | UIPL
So why is Google indexing it ? & how do I get it out of there. I tried in webmaster tool but I could not , as it seems like a sub-domain. Any ideas ? Thanks Naresh Sadasivan0 -
Will updating part of my site help a static web page
Hi, what i am trying to find out is, i have a page on my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy and i would like to know, once i have got the page to the way i want it, the page will not change, so i would like to know if i update my site and add pages and articles, will the updates help this page with google rankings, or do i have to keep updating this page if i want it to rank high with google. i have seen pages that have never changed but they continue to rank high with google and i would like to know their secret
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Best on-line tool for checking indexed pages (or just for a Mac)
Hey guys, I'm on a Mac and that's why I can't use the usual PC software for checking if my links have been indexed. Here's the deal. I ordered some guest posts. The guest poster did it for me and put my back links. Now, I want to quickly check which pages (with my backlinks) have been indexed. I have a lot of guest posts. So, I need something that can check if those pages have been indexed by Google. I need an online tool or something that will work for my Mac. Help. 🙂
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0 -
Should rel canonical tags include the root domain
It does sound like a silly question but bear with me a little... I recently installed on my Joomla website a module that automatically creates rel canonical tags for pages that contain lists that can be sorted by different criteria: (price, alphabetic order, etc...) I know that a proper canonical tag should look like this: However, the module I'm using creates the following structure Will this work? I mean, will it be "understood" by the bots? To see what the module actually does, you can visit the following link http://www.quipeutlefaire.fr/fr/index.php?sort=price&sort_direction=desc&limit=10&limitstart=0&option=com_auctions&category=240 In the source code you will see that the canonical tag is Which is the original "unsorted" page. Thanks in advance for your help
Technical SEO | | QPLF0