Canonical URL tags help I am not sure what this is
-
I am trying to get an A grade on my webpage and this is one of the critical steps canonical URL tags I cant find much information as to what this even is never mind fixing it. Thanks I am a total newbe at this any advice is appreciated
-
Unfortunately, I don't know Etsy well, but I think Thomas is right on track - you don't necessarily want to pre-emptively add them, especially if you're not clear on how they work. Typically, it's more for preventing duplicate content issues. We're re-evaluating how we grade the canonical tag, since this is a bit confusing. It's a good practice on some pages (like your home-page) that naturally tend to have more than one version, but adding it sitewide can be tricky.
-
Thanks so much everyone huge help
-
The canonical isn't really for feeding google URLs in the a preferred format, it's more for cleaning up duplicate content issues.
Let's say I could track traffic and conversions on my website by adding a source code to a link. So I create a link on SEOmoz. You can reach my page www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php with the url string http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php?src=seomoz and that link is now indexed by Google. Well now I have duplicate content and google must decide which page get's placed into their index. Adding a canonical to the main page
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com/pest-control.php" />
, tells google which page they should place in their index and it helps me avoid splitting my links.
This also applies heavily to shopping carts where the parameters in a URL determine the content, and products that overlap in categories can cause duplicate content issues. Creating canonicals will help avoid indexing issues.
So the point to canonicals is to determine what URL gets indexed and gets the juice for links when there are duplicate content issues created by varying URL stings that lead to the same content.
If you are simply trying to fill in a canonical for a URL to get a "A grade" on a SEO checklist then you will just create the canonical for each page using the exact URL for that page.
-
I think Etsy does all that stuff for you automatically. If you check source code of your store at Etsy it already has rel canonical, so no need to worry.
Make sure your URL for on page report looks like this www.etsy.com/shop/yourshopname
It's how canonical is build.
-
Hi Jen
There are some useful blog posts on here which help with understanding the use of a canonical link listed below.
You would place the link on the duplicate content pages, and link these through to the page that you want the link juice to go to. The pages still appear from a user perspective but google does not see them.
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
You can use the seo moz crawl to see which pages are duplicates.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks very much for your reply
I am still a little confused how do I know what to change it too ? is there a tool that allows me to see what google url prefers I am selling on etsy does that make a difference ?
Thanks,
Jen
-
It's tag that tells Google which url for given post is most preffered. This helps avoid problems with duplicate content. Use if you have www and non-www url or post with same content within different categories.
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
-
URL best practices
Hi, I have a problem here, I used http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs.html instead of http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs. Hence, http://www.vietnamvisacorp.com/faqs will be caused 404 page. My question is should I change from faqs.html to faqs (no .html)? Thanks in advance any advice?
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHuynh0 -
Temporary redirect - help!
I ran an audit on a new clients website (they did a redesign and fell off of the radar). One of the major issues that the audit came back with was over 6,000 warnings for temporary re-directs. This is a large e-commerce site and I know there will be errors but wondering why the company who did the redesign wouldn't do a 301? Would someone be able to look at this code and tell me if what they did is correct? One of the many pages that has the temporary redirect: http://www.toyotapartsstore.com/index.php?route=checkout/cart&product_id=1 Where all the many pages with errors is redirecting to: http://www.toyotapartsstore.com/index.ph
On-Page Optimization | | KnopfBay0 -
Importance of URL Structure
We are trying to restructure our onpage SEO and want to make sure we have our URLs correct. The problem is we did the URLs incorrectly in the first place and the ones we currently have are several years olds. We have some URLs such as: http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/management/prince2.asp and
On-Page Optimization | | RobertChapman
http://www.firebrandtraining.co.uk/courses/cisco/ccna_2007.asp which are not ideal but user experience aside does it make sense for us to change the URLs and use 301 redirects to the new ones or is the damage done to our natural rankings simply not worth making the change? I have read different articles saying different things, some say that URL structure has little weight (if any weight at all) on rankings while other people seem to say it is quite important. In addition we have heard that changing the URLs with a 301 redirect will cause a large drop in ranking which will take months to recover from and contrarily that 301s are now considered "ok" by Google and we shouldn't see too much change at all in our rankings. Any advice would be much appreciated.0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
How many meta tags are appropriate?
How many meta tags are appropriate? There is a page that ranks above me that has many more than I do. It has (I have removed the content of each to give a description of the type of content): I only use meta tags for keywords and description, robots. Should I have more? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0 -
Absolute vs relative urls
Hello, Should absolute or relative urls to be used for the internal links? I heard mixed opinions on that: One source claims that web crawlers prefer absolute urls as they are more understandable Other source points that there is no difference for web crawlers what urls are used and relative urls are shorter which reduces the size of a page. Which option is recommended? Many thanks Darius
On-Page Optimization | | LinenMe0 -
Opinions on Alt tags
Reading around the web, there are many sources that suggest all images should have an Alt tag attributed to them. This is good for accessibility etc, however there appears to be conflicting interests between this and what works for SEO. Hence many other sources suggest that you include a keyphrase or two in 1 image Alt tag, and then leave the rest blank so as not to dilute the alts on the page. In my experience, the latter appears to be true. However this seems wrong when the Alt attribute really should be used for accessibility reasons and not for SEO - why would the search engines encourage us to provide poorer quality information by harming our rankings if we try to make a website accessible? Interested to hear your opinions and experiences on this subject. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RiceMedia0