What is "canonical." And what do I need to do to fix it?
-
I'm seeing about 450 warnings on this.
What is "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."
And what do I need to do to fix it?
-
Anthony's definitely got the basics covered. How to handle any particular situation can get pretty tricky. I wrote a post about it, and that post got very long very fast:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
I took a quick look at your campaign (I have Staff access), and it seems your login page is carrying an event ID - so every event is creating a different URL, but they all land on one page. That could spin out 100s of duplicates on Google, and that login page has little or no search value. A canonical tag would definitely be a good bet here.
You may have other issues going on, but clean up one at a time - getting that number down can definitely be beneficial and help boost your ranking power.
-
Anthony's response is correct for explaining what a canonical does. My response is for how to implement it. Say you have an online store that uses a bread crumb system. While you may have one main URL for a widget, multiple URLs could be created if visitors are taking multiple paths to find this widget. So say the main URL for this widget's page is: example.com/widget You could have many copies of this page on your website with different URLs. If you have URLs such as example.com/widget/1, example.com/widget/2, example.com/widget/3, and they all have the same content as example.com/widget, Google will see all of these pages as being duplicate content. So to take care of this you use a canonical. If you want example.com/widget to be the page that has the authority over the rest of the other URLs with the same content, you will need to create a canonical. The canonical for example.com/widget is: SEE EDIT BELOW Then you will want to take the canonical and put it somewhere inbetween the header for all of those URLs that have the same content. And as Anthony said www.example.com/widget is considered a different page than example.com/widget, so it would need the canonical from above as well, and the same goes for www. example.com/widget/1-3. http://www.ginzametrics.com/cheatsheet This link will take you to a great tool that generates meta tags and can also create a canonical link for you, if you don't want to type it all out. To make a canonical with the tool just copy and paste the main URL that you would like to use and it will create the canonical link below that you can copy and paste into the the pages head. EDIT: I don't think SEOmoz will let you post canonicals. But if you go the the link with the tool I provided you should still be able to create a canonical. It is a very simple and straight forward tool that can generate the canonical for you. Good luck.
-
There is a very good explanation of "canonical" at http://tinyurl.com/38ycpw8. by Jody Nimetz
The first part of it I have inserted here..... trust it helps:
Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.
Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same:
www.example.com
example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.aspThe fact is that these are all different URLs. From a search engine perspective, this can cause a bit of an issue. Hence the idea of canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL (to present to the search engines) when there are multiple choices available. Typically a search engine, such as Google will attempt to pick the best URL that they feel is the authority for that page. However, sometimes they may in fact select the wrong one. Now let’s suggest that you have product pages that depending on how the user navigated to the pager returns a different URL… same page but different URL, now we have a duplicate content issue. Not to mention the nightmare for interlinking and external link inventories.
The easiest way to avoid this is to let the Search engines and the users know which is your “preferred URL” a.k.a canonical URL.............................
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
-
"No Meta Description Tag"
Google is not showing Meta Description for the Keyword Rankings of my website in the SERPs. All of my Keywords Ranking are coming with just two fields. Which are just 1. Title Tag & 2. Page URL. The description tag is missing in it. Here is a proof Kindly advice please.
Technical SEO | | seobac1 -
404 or rel="canonical" for empty search results?
We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank. Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues. We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else? I look forward to the discussion.
Technical SEO | | 4RS_John1 -
We have 302 redirect links on our forum that point to individual posts. Should we add a rel="nofollow" to these links?
Moz is showing us that we have a HUGE amount of 302 redirects. These are coming from our community forum. Forum URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/ Example thread URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/ Example URL that points to a specific reply: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewreply/1582/ The above link 302 redirects to this URL: https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/viewthread/322/#1582 My two questions would be: Do you think we should we add rel=nofollow to the specific reply URLs? If possible, should we make those redirects 301 vs. 302? Screencast attached. nofollow_302.mp4
Technical SEO | | Bjork1 -
"HTTP error: 404 not found" submitting YOAST SITEMAP
When I upload the YOAST site map to google webmaster i get "HTTP error: 404 not found" just for the portfolio tag and categories..For other things iI dont get any i kinf of errors Is it because i dont have any tags and categories of portfolio element? I have to say in my template I have the portfolio post option but im not using it. Tx
Technical SEO | | tourtravel0 -
What to do with "show all" page
Hello, What should I do with the following situation: In e-commerce shop I have an option to "show all products" (list all products in one page) - do I need to put canonnical or 301 redirect to somewhere or should I leave as normal page - I think google consider this is as duplicate since everything is the same (only number of products is different) ? Regards, Nenad
Technical SEO | | Uniline0 -
Wordpress "incoming search terms" plugin
Hello everyone! newbie to SEO and have been trying to keep everything nice and ethical but I've seen on a couple of blogs today "incoming search terms" at the bottom of the blogs, then a bullet pointed list of search terms beneath it. So I had a quick search about the use of it and noticed wordpress has a plugin that automatic ally generates these "incoming search terms". I ask is this a legitimate plugin or will this harm my blog? I assume it generally will as I can't see this being much use for the audience, rather it would be 100% for trying to lure in search engines.
Technical SEO | | acecream0 -
Different levels of PA without "www"?
Hello Guy´s! The last days I have been surprised to see that the levels of PA, mR, and mT vary when it is or not the "www" in the URL: 1. http://patagonline.com/viajes-argentina 2. http://www.patagonline.com/viajes-argentina Both URL's correspond to the keyword "viajes Argentina" our incoming links... In this case, it´s convenient to do a 301redirect from URL 1 to 2? Thanks a lot for your help!!
Technical SEO | | maty0 -
We have been hit with the "Doorway Page" Penalty - fixed the issue - Got MSG that will still do not meet guidelines.
I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: YES / NO
Technical SEO | | LVH
My site's URL (web address) is:www.recoveryconnection.org
Description (including timeline of any changes made): We were hit with the Doorway Pages penalty on 5/26/11. We have a team of copywriters, and a fast-working dev dept., so we were able to correct what we thought the problem was, "targeting one-keyword per page" and thin content. (according to Google) Plan of action: To consolidate "like" keywords/content onto pages that were getting the most traffic and 404d the pages with the thin content and that were targeting singular keywords per page. We submitted a board approved reconsideration request on 6/8/11 and received the 2nd message (below) on 6/16/11. ***NOTE:The site was originally designed by the OLD marketing team who was let go, and we are the NEW team trying to clean up their mess. We are now resorting to going through Google's general guidelines page. Help would be appreciated. Below is the message we received back. Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.recoveryconnection.org/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We've reviewed your site and we believe that some or all of your pages still violate our quality guidelines. In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from http://www.recoveryconnection.org/ may not appear or may not rank as highly in Google's search results, or may otherwise be considered to be less trustworthy than sites which follow the quality guidelines. If you wish to be reconsidered again, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When such changes have been made, please visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?hl=en and resubmit your site for reconsideration. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team Any help is welcome. Thanks0