Using the Canonical Tag
-
Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this:
But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats:
The problems I see on this is:
All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content.
My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part.
Is the canonical tag useful in this case?
Thank you!
-
thank you Sameer, thank you Peter, very useful!
-
As a standard practice, a webpage will not be considered duplicate if the content is 60% unique. However, having a "id" tag on the indexed pages is not a good user experience and Google certainly will not like too many pages will the id tags.
Here are three options that you can follow -
1. Go to "Parameter handling" in Site configuration settings in Google webmaster tools for your website and add "id" as on of the parameter. There is a good chance that Google will read this and ignore all the pages on your site with the parameter "id". We have tested this and found to be successful for ton of the parameters we use on our website including campaign tracking codes.
2. Continue using rel canonicals for duplicate pages so Google bot may not index it.
3. Make changes to your site code to each time a user creates a new page it will be created as a seperate url without any "id" parameter (similar to url shortners like bit.ly). This will allow you to tap in the UGC easily.
Thanks
Sameer
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
i have some static webpages in root and wordpress installed in subdirectory , Canonical tag for the whole website was with trailing slash , i stripped the HTML extensions for static webpages but i can't force to add trailing slash to the static webpages so i changed the canonical for html webpages from http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html/ to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles but the Wordpress" http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/ " still with trailing slash , when i've checked my google webmasters i found that my indexed pages dropped down 100 page ! what should i put in the canonical for the static pages? i tried to strip the slash from wordpress but i failed , so my static webpages canonical with no trailing slash and wordpress with trailing slash .
Technical SEO | | NeatIT0 -
Are correcting missing meta descrption tags a good use of time?
My modest website (shew-design.com) has pulled up nearly sixty crawl errors. Almost all of them are missing meta description tags. One friend who knows SEO better than me says that adding meta tags to EVERY page is not a good use of time. My site is available at shew-design.com I'm just getting started in being serious about applying SEO to our site and I want to make sure I'm making the best use of my time. The other error I'm getting are duplicate page names within different directories (e.g. getting started (for branding), getting started (for web). Is this a huge priority? Would welcome your feedback.
Technical SEO | | Eric_Shew0 -
Custom hreflang tags in WP & using with Yoast
Hi My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as: "Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code" Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ? Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ? Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below: _One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
_you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
_add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
sorted. _But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
_using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
_Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
what you think is best. So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ? Cheers dan0 -
What if I point my canonicals to a URL version that is not used in internal links
My web developer has pointed the "good" URLs that I use in my internal link structure (top-nav/footer) to another duplicate version of my pages. Now the URLs that receive all the canonical link value are not the ones I use on my website. is this a problem and why??? In theory the implementation is good because both have equal content. But does it harm my link equity if it directs to a URL which is not included in my internal link architecture.
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Rel Canonical ? please help again!
Hi, I have been looking at the on page section and the grading. And I have noticed on nearly all of my pages an error. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Number of Canonical tags</dt> <dd>2</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>Remove all but a single canonical URL tag</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a> Please how do I make sure these canonicals are working properly, My rankings are getting worst fro long tail and short tail keywords. I am not even ranking for the main keywords "Probate" at all now! Our site is probate, we sell probate, we talk aout probate and now we are out of the top 200??? http://www.finalduties.co.uk Kind Regards Elissa HAyes
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Is it a good idea to use the rel canonical tag to refer to the original source?
Sometimes we place our blog post also on a external site. In this case this post is duplicated. Via the post we link to the original source but is it also possible to use the rel canonical tag on the external site? For example: The original blogpost is published on http://www.original.com/post The same blogpost is published on http:///www.duplicate.com/post. In this case is it wise to put a rel canonical on http://www.duplicate.com/post like this: ? What do you think? Thanks for help! Robert
Technical SEO | | Searchresult0 -
Is using a Href in Div OK?
Hi, I was just wondering what your thoughts are on using a Href in a Div, which contains anchor text. We currently use the Href on the div, as opposed to just the anchor text as I want the whole div to be clickable as opposed to just the anchor text. So currently I have: Keword 1
Technical SEO | | James77
Keyword 2 Is this perfectly fine to do it like this as opposed to using <a tags="" ???<br="">I suppose there are various alternatives - if you must use the</a><a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> <a tag="" like:<="" p=""></a> Keword 1
Keyword 2 However I would assume a search engine is smart enought to know its the same thing??? Thanks0
