Canonical URL Tag Usage
-
Hi there,
I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page?
Kind Regards
-
I will do Hannah, thanks again.
-
Hey,
Re the rel-canonical, Bing say they don't like that implementation, but Google are fine with it. My advice? Yep - do it
Thanks
Hannah
PS If you want to ask a new question it's best to start a new thread - more likely to get seen & answered
-
Hi Hannah,
Just one more question please.
If I had just one website, would you always advice in using a canonical tag for every webpage on that site?
So, http://www.example.com/product-page/ would have canonical tag
rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/product-page/" />
-
Thanks Hannah for all your help, I will let you know how it goes.
Kind Regards
-
Yep - you need to place the tags on every page which is duplicated across both sites
-
AH! at the moment I only have one hreflang on each domain
.co.uk website has:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IE" href="http://www.mywebsite.ie" />
and .ie website has:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk" />
Was I doing it wrong to start with?
-
Like the rel="alternate" tag you need to put the canonical tag on every page of your .ie site pointing to the relevant page on your .co.uk site. You should also put the canonical tag on the .co.uk site pointing to itself - e.g.:
So on http://yourdomain.co.uk/page-whatever you'd need:
http://yourdomain.ie/page-whatever; />
http://yourdomain.ie/page-whatever - you'd need:
-
Hi Hannah,
Thanks for your feedback.
This is very interesting indeed Hannah, so this means that the .ie version will fall away in SERPs?
Technical question: Do I put the canonical tag on the .ie website pointing to the .co.uk website?
rel="canonical" href="http://www.mywebsite.co.uk"/>
Do I put a canonical tag on the .co.uk website?
Appreciate your help.
-
Hi Gary,
I think on this occasion you ought to use both rel="alternate" and the canonical tag.
One of my colleagues had a conversation with a Googler which supports and explains this further:
I hope this helps,
Hannah
-
Yes, everything is correct in Google webmaster tools. I have a feeling even though this is correct in webmaster tools that Google is counting as duplicate.
-
What are Google Webmaster Tools telling you? Have you used it to tell Google your site is geotargeted?
-
Hi Highland,
Thanks for your reply.
Do you know what is happening with this then? as it has no PR anymore plus it's not in the index
-
In this case, no. Matt Cutts has stated that country TLDs that are duplicate are not generally seen as duplicate by Google.
-
Hi Stefan,
Yes, in Google webmaster tools that countries are set, however one of the keywords I was ranking well for has disappeared from the .co.uk results, when I paste the first paragraph of the .co.uk page in question into .co.uk, its the .ie website that appears, I have also put this on the .co.uk & .ie webpages in question:
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IE" href="mysite.ie" />
<link < span="">rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="mysite.co.uk" /></link <>
I put the above code about 10 days ago, but still not sorted the problem, I feel that I need to tell Google that the .co.uk website is the original, what do you think?
-
Hello Gary,
You can use the
hreflang="'en-IE" href="www.your-ie.site"> element
For more information see: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077
You can also in Google webmaster tools set the country a specific domain is targeting.
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
-
Canonical tag on a large site
when would you reccomend using a canonical tag on a large site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cristiana.Solinas0 -
How would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?
Bit of a weird case, but let me explain. We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dragonlawhq
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle). We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website). Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-page My understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Does a non-canonical URL pass link juice?
Our site received a great link from URL A, which was syndicated to URL B. But URL B is canonicalized to URL A. Does the link on URL B pass juice to my site? (See image below for a visual representation of my question) zgbzqBy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice1 -
H Tags Vs "H Style" Tags?
Hey everybody! So I was wondering what the difference between the H tags and "H Style". My first thought is that it's just the style guide, and not actually a meta tag, but before I go around changing all these styles I want to make sure my computer isn't going to explode SEO juice. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Is link juice passed through a 301 and a canonical tag?
Hi all, I am led to believe that link juice does not pass through more than one 301 redirect, however what about a 301 and then a canonical meta tag? Here is an example: subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> 301 -> **www.**site.com/uk/page/ www.site.com**/uk/**page/ -> canonical -> www.site.com/page/ Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris0