Is this causing me to drop in rank?
-
Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title.
I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes.
Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here:
-
That was great content sir ! i added the comments there - adding the same question here also !
This article is very huge and will print it for better understanding !
My problem with the blog is the Duplicate content is marked as for Search Terms or Tags ! like i have written 10 post about design art, i added tags as "design art" in the tag form. using WordPress.org self hosted website !
-
I'm afraid there's no one, easy answer. I have a comprehensive post about dupe content here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
-
Peter, I just discovered I have tons of duplicate content & titles. How can I fix them? It is hurting.
-
Yeah, looks like I was of no use at all I'm glad it's working.
-
I'm seeing the bad canonical tag gone now. Are you seeing the same thing? Maybe just had a short-term caching issue.
-
Nope, no content delivery network. This is crazy. No idea what's happening.
-
Nope, no content delivery network. This is crazy. No idea what's happening.
-
We are definitely not seeing the same thing. Are you perchance using a content delivery network? It might just take some time to update if so.
I suggest we both keep an eye on it and make sure that it's fixed for both of us going forward
-
@Carson,
This is so odd. When I look at the page, I see this. Am I seeing something different than what you are seeing?
-
I see the same as you for that post, but I still see the canoncial on posts like this:
This is why I'm thinking you might have fixed it, and we're just seeing an old static version of the page. Re-caching the pages and/or updating posts might fix it up.
-
What's strange is when I view the source on that page, I don't see it:
-
Yes, I do. I'm been clearing the cache.
-
If you guys are both seeing it, I'm really confused. When I look at my source code, I see this:
-
I cleared my cache and I still see it on posts. I suppose it's worth asking if you have a caching/site speed plugin?
-
Just tried a different browser. Weird thing is that I'm seeing it on some pages, but not on others. For example. it's here still:
-
Nope...
-
Are there any admin settings in your theme itself? You may something built in that's re-adding the tag at a higher level in the code. Could be an admin flag needs to be reset.
-
I'm still seeing it as well. When you re-visit header.php now, is the line you deleted still gone?
-
Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again? When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.
-
Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again? When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.
-
Oh - yeah - that definitely doesn't look good. Probably a holdover from the template. You could just comment it out, but dumping it completely is fine, I suspect.
Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the canonical in the pages I'm checking (?)
-
Thanks Carson,
It looks like I may have figured it out. I checked out the header.php file and noticed this: . So I just deleted it, and it seems to be working fine.
-
Hi there,
Make sure to check any plugins first. Some themes and plugins offer the option to add any code you like to the head - it sounds like there might be a static canonical tag in a field like this. That would be my first thought - let me know if I can be of assistance in fixing this up.
Thanks,
Carson
-
No problem. Thanks!
-
Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert by any means. I'll ping the team.
-
yelp. When I first found the problem, I figured out the theme and the plug in were both adding a canonical url, so I took out the function in the theme to add the canonical url. Everything was working when you looked at the post the other day and noticed there was only 1 canonical url. But today I was looking at some code, and noticed it was back to 2 on each one.
What do you suggest looking at / check out?
-
I'm seeing the 2 canonical tags, but unfortunately, there's almost no way to tell from the outside why the top one is being added. It looks like your plug-in is working correctly. This is a WordPress-based site, correct?
-
@Peter,
I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?
-
@Peter,
I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?
-
Same here. Thanks.
Hope you are doing well.
-
You've got the self-referencing canonical tags in place, which is about the best fix - unfortunately, there's no way to "undo" a bad canonical other than put a good canonical in its place. Hopefully, Google only picked up a few and, given the popularity of your site, they'll re-index pretty quickly.
-
Yes, I caught it. And it did pick up the canonical to the home page...I lost rank on a ton of key words. I'm hoping it gets fixed in the next index.
-
Did you fix it? I'm only seeing one canonical now. That would definitely be bad - if Google picked up the canonical to the home-page, you could collapse a ton of pages into one and effectively knock them out of the index (and, by extension, any ability to rank).
-
Thanks for the reply, but in this case I don't think that would apply.
What's happening is the them is putting 2 canonical urls into each post. The url of the current page, and the home page. So google is getting confused. Trying to fix it now.
-
Usually when you change themes you can have a temporary drop down, this is normal.
Please, read this Q&A there is a very good answer from EGOL: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-template-for-new-website
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
-
Any risks involved in removing a sub-domain from search index or completely taking down? Ranking impact?
Hi all, One of our sub-domains has thousands of indexed pages but traffic is very less and irrelevant. There are links between this sub-domain to other sub domains of ours. We are planning to take this subdomain completely. What happens if so? Google responds for this with a ranking change? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Competitor's new site ranking with out much keywords - How?
Hi all, One of our competitors have recently redesigned their website with new content. Now I can see much less keywords in the content. And page title also changed away from keywords. Still this is ranking at good position. How? Previously they used to have much landing pages with related keywords which some of them are missing now. Still I wonder why this website is ranking high? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
How to optimise non-homepage to beat homepage in rankings? Are we on right path?
Hi all, We have a page with "keyword" in slug like "website.com/keyword" where our homepage is "website.com". This "keyword" difficulty is very high, so every minor factor contributing here and we have noticed competitors' pages with "keyword" in URL ranking. Then we also planned to rank this page "website.com/keyword" and interlinked high, so it'll be favoured by Google which didn't happen. So may be we should reduce the interlinking to homepage and optimise this keyword page more to rank for this keyword. Still I doubt the chances of ranking this page is difficult and need much more. How to make this page ranked replacing homepage? If there are no options for this, we are planning to redirect our homepage to this page; so Google will slowly adopt it. Suggestions please. Thank you.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Does a Website Overlay Hurt Ranking?
We are looking into personalizing visits on our website. Rather than to write Tb of code on each page, we want to use a little line of Java script on the page, that would allow to place overlay on the site, depending on the visitor. Example: Change the home page picture when a returning visitor comes back on the website and show him/her a different picture bases upon the pages he/she visited prior. Would that overlay be caught by Google and would G have a problem with that? We all know about cloaking, but G does not penalize for heat mapping overlays, for example. Or not to my knowledge they don't. Thanks all for your personal insights! Peter
Web Design | | Discountvc0 -
Will changing content managment systems affect rankings?
We're considering changing our content management system. This would probably change our url structure (keep root domain name, but specific product pages and what not would have different full urls). Will our rankings be affected if we use different urls for current pages? I know we can do 401 redirects, but anything else I should consider? Thanks, Dan
Web Design | | dcostigan0 -
Site down for more than a month - lost rankings
Hello, We have run into a situtation where we had multiple pages setup for different keywords but didn't realize that we had a name server issue that has caused the pages to be down for the last month or so (2-3 weeks on the low side.) The rank finder was still working fine, but the offline page was never reported. We realized the situation recently and have since gotten the sites back online under the new nameservers. Most of these sites were ranking 1 and 2 spots in their keywords, and now are no where to be found in the Google Index. Should I do anything differently, or just put the sites back online and wait it out? I have seen in different places that it may only take 2 weeks to come back, but it's possible that Google has marked the sites as 'not quality' because of their downtime and it will be even harder to get them to rank again. Can anyone shed any light on this situation? Any information is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | EQ-Richie0 -
Development site accidentally crawled - Will this cause problems?
We are currently developing a new version of our website and to make it easy to access for all team members, we just set it up on a server accessible via a publicly accessible domain name (ie devsite.com). There has been no SEO and no links created to this site, or so I thought. Recently, I found out that Google somehow found its way to this development site and has been indexing the pages! I was a little alarmed, as there are no links to the domain and we'll soon be transitioning all the content over to our primary production domain. I immediately created a robots.txt file to disallow access to the entire development domain. My fear is that there may be some duplicate content penalty if Google sees that the content that is on our new site (once it goes live and is pushed to our REAL domain name) was previously indexed on our test domain. We're slated to launch in 2-3 weeks. Is there anything else I should do? Should I even be worried? I'm probably a bit paranoid, but given the amount of time and effort that has gone into this new site, I love any advice or thoughts. Thank You!
Web Design | | AndrewY0