What does Canonical mean?
-
Hi,
I was wondering what is meant by canonical? I ran a test on my site and in the notices, SEOMOZ came back with a total of 90 canonicals. As far as I can tell, it refers to the preferred page (not really sure what that means though). I thought initially it was talking about duplicate content, but all the pages are totally different. There is no duplicate content on any of he pages that it lists. So I'm not sure how to fix this.
Thanks for the help.
Don
-
Thanks Guys,
Really appreciate your input.
Don
-
Just as Broadbeach Media said is the canonical tag to indicate pages with similar content. Big advantage is that you can tell Google which one is the important one and needs to be indexed.
More detailled info you can find here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
Good day ge0173400,
Basically canonical was created to tell Google that if you 2 or more pages that have the same content, which page with that content you want Google to focus on.
For example you have 3 pages regarding gold fish. All 3 pages have nearly the exact same content except the species of gold fish. All of a sudden you have duplicate content now. It is then up to you to decide which page you would like to get the most value (let's say page 1). You then put a canonical link on pages 2 & 3 pointing to page 1. This means that when Google crawls pages 2 & 3 it will find out that it should focus on page 1.
If the above is confusing, definitely have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps It does a great (and better) job of explaining canonical.
Best of luck.
-
Straight from the horses mouth:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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 question - Would this create some sort of crawler redirection loop?
What happens if a canonical link, links to the url with / but the main url does not have the / For example: rel="canonical" href="https://www.exampleURL.co.uk/"> Main URL - https://www.exampleURL.co.uk (without the /) 301 Redirect https://www.exampleURL.co.uk/ to https://www.exampleURL.co.uk Would this create some sort of crawler redirection loop?
On-Page Optimization | | Evosite10 -
Do non-canonical pages need to worry about things like Alt Text, H1 tags, etc?
Just wanted to confirm, if we have multiple similar pages, with all of their canonicals pointing towards the prime page, does it impact SEO rankings at all if the non-canonical pages were missing alt text from their images, or shared duplicate or multiple H1 tags? Basic SEO page construction stuff? I know some will hurt user CTR but wanted to make sure that SEO crawlers don't care about them even if indexed.
On-Page Optimization | | SimonZM2 -
Rel=canonical vs noindex/follow - tabs with individual URLs
Hi everyone I've got a situation that I haven't seen in quite this way before. I would like some advice on whether I should be rel=canonicalzing of noindexing/following a range of pages on a clients website. I've just started working on a website that creates individual URLs for tabs within each page which has resulted in several URLs being created for each listing: Example URLs: hotel-downtown-calgary hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery?tab hotel-downtown-calgary?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/map?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area?tab Google has indexed over 1500 pages with the "?tab" parameter (there are 4380 page indexed for the site in total), and also seems to be indexing some of these pages without the "?tab" parameter i.e. ("hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews" instead of "hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab") so the amount of potential duplication could be more. These tabbed pages are getting minimal traffic from organic search, so I've got no issues with taking them out of the index - the question is how. There are the issues I see: Each tab has the same title as the other tabs for each location, so lots of title duplication. Each individual tab doesn't have much content (although the content each tab has is unique). I would usually expect the tabs to be distinguished by the parameters only, not have unique URLs - if that was the case we wouldn't have a duplication issue. So the question is: rel=canonical or noindex/follow? I can see benefits of both. Looking forward to your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | Digitator0 -
Using Canonical & INDEX, FOLLOW meta tag
I am sort of new to this, and working with an overseas development team on an eCommerce site. I am curious if the Canonical tag will supersede the tag, or if it is best to remove this tag entirely for duplicate product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BretDarby1 -
Rel="Canonical"
Hi!, We´ve just launched a new website and on this web we are using a lot Call to Actions on every page of the web and all of this CTA`s goes to the same Landing Page. (Ej: http://www.landing page.com) The problem comes when Google says this Landing Page is duplicate content because we are using some parameters like, for instance, http://www.landing page.com/?fuente=Soporteensalesforce So now we have just 1 Landing Page but Google sees 13 pages, because of this parameters and Moz alerted me that Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Yesterday I put this on the head of the only Landing Page we have so Google can see it in the proper way, as just one landing, but I don´t know if it is enough or should I do anything else? What I put on the Head: Hope someone can help me about this because I´ve tried to find a solution and this is the only thing that came up to me, and don´t know if it´s the right thing. Thanks for your time!
On-Page Optimization | | Manuel_LeadClic0 -
Need Suggestion for Canonical Page
Hello, I am bit confused about whether to use a Canonical URL on a page or not? Actually, the project I am working on is having two pages with most similar content. The only difference between them is that only 1 paragraph of 50-60 words is different. I am not sure, whether to put a canonical URL on the another version of the page. [Note: Sorry, can't put the site URL due to some restrictions.]
On-Page Optimization | | Anup_More0 -
Rel canonical tag question
Im trying to to fix my duplicate content problem with my catagory pages in my shopping cart. I have read about adding a rel canonical tag to the page so it links back to the main catagory page. So if I add a rel canonical tag to the main catagory page it will show up on every other page for that catagory like page 1 page 2 and so on and it will have the tag linking back to the main cat. That should fix it it right? Now that being said I cant seem to add the tag invetween the head tags. I can add it to the body where I can add content. Will the rel canonical tag work outside the head tags? Any other ideas on this fix? I contacted my people that host the cart to see if they have any features to help this will see what they say.
On-Page Optimization | | Dataken0 -
Confirmation regarding canonical and syndication google tags
Hi, We are in the process of improving our CMS upstream to resolve our duplicate content issues. We were hit pretty hard by the Panda update. One of the steps we have taken is implementation of the canonical link tag across all domains in our site. You see, we are a news release service with muliple channels and websites to represent each. The problem is that a client will submit a release and in many cases the news item is relevant to multiple channels I.E. multiple websites under the same IP range. Site Examples:
On-Page Optimization | | jarrett.mackay
www.hotelnewsresource.com www.restaurantnewsresource.com
www.travelindustrywire.com From a user perspective, it makes sense that they should be able to access the article from the site they are browsing without being redirected to the site we feel carries the most relevance. We hope the canconical tag will resolve this issue for us. I have also read about the syndication tag and was looking for feedback or recommendations if we should implement that also, but it may be overkill as the two tags objectives seem to be similar. I guess my first question is if the syndication tag is only used by Google News. Secondly, and a little off topic is that we also offer an API and like many other sites, I have read, our content partners are now doing better in primary and long tail rankings even thought we are the original source. My assumption is that we should modify the API to force using both caconical and syndication tags as well. Lastly, I´m curious if anyone has tested the original source tag and if we should implement that as well. Thanks everyone. Jarrett0