What is the proper syntax for rel="canonical" ??
-
I believe the proper syntax is like this [taken from the SEOMoz homepage]:
However,
one of the sites I am working on has all of their canonical tags set up like this:
I should clarify, not all of their canonicals are identical to this one, they simply use this naming convention, which appears to be relative URLs instead of absolute.
Doesn't the entire URL need to be in the tag? If that is correct, can you also provide me with an explanation that I can give to management please? They hate it when I say "Because I said so!" LOL
-
Thanks Dr. Pete! An you know what? You are absolutely right. Google has interpreted the canonical just that way and it's been in our GWT reports forever and no one could figure out where they were coming from.
Thank you, thank you, thank you (in my Gomer Pyle voice, of course!)
Wow, it's amazing how fixing one thing can sometimes take you down a whole nother road and fix something else at the same time. I just can't thank both you and George enough.
Kudos to George on a great answer.
-
Endorsing George for the full thread. Technically, Google does allow relative URLs, but I've heard of some odd issues, so I think it's better to use full URLs. Your home-page version isn't really either an absolute or relative URL - you really should have the "http://" (protocol) in that URL. If you're being nitpicky, that's an improper URL, and Google could end up interpreting it as something like:
http://www.ccisolutions.com/www.ccisolutions.com
Now, odds are, they won't, but with these tags it's really best to do it by the book.
-
No problem, glad to help!
-
Agreed. I think if we can change the Storefront to storefront without having to employ any kinds of redirects it would be great. Otherwise, the site is so old, that it may not matter.
Along those lines, we recently had the opportunity to remove /Storefront from the URL string. We chose not to because the site is 10 years old and didn't want to risk losing any page or domain authority by having a whole bunch of 301 redirects.
Certainly interested to know your take from the viewpoint of someone who knows code. Thanks George!
-
Yes, you are correct. But only if you have a base link in the document:
<base href="http://www.ccisolutions.com/">
This is a very good example for why you may want to stick to Absolute URLs. With an absolute URL you only need to know the actual URL of the page:
Hopefully I'm not adding even more to the fire, but now might be a good time to change "StoreFront" to "storefront" all lowercase. I think lowercase URLs are better if you can use them.
-
Thanks so very much George for your thorough answer. This is exactly what I needed know, and it makes it possible for me to explain it to the CEO. It appears we have a confusing mixture of absolute and relative URLs, that need to be sorted out. I think sticking with the absolutes will makes it much easier.
While we have this on the home page:
This is an example of a category page canonical tag:
Would I be correct is saying that there is a problem here because the actual URL of the page is
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/wireless-microphones
So if we are going to use the relative URL in our canonical tag, it should be:
Is that correct?
-
Also just to clarify, when you state they are using "relative" URLs, are you talking about "www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html" vs. "http://www.ccisoultions.com/page1.html"?
If this is true, then both versions are absolute URLs. A relative URL is different. Here are a few examples of relative URLs:
page1.html
/products/page1.html
../products/page1.html
../images/image1.jpg
/images/image1.jpg
image1.jpg
Each of the above are "relative links". Absolute links look like the following and don't necessarily need the "http://":
www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html
http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html
Hope this helps too.
-
Document refers to the single web page you are placing the canonical link on.
The base link is referring to the URL you can provide as the href property for the base tag. The base tag can be included in the head of your HTML document.
Example base link:
<base href="http://www.ccisolutions.com/">
If you choose to use the example base link above and this relative URL:
Your canonical link will end up referring to “http://www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html”.
Here is a second example, this time using a new base link which includes the products directory:
<base href="http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/">
If you choose to use this new base link and the following relative URL:
Your canonical link will end up referring to “http://www.ccisolutions.com/products/page1.html”.
If you choose to use this new base link and this relative URL:
Your canonical link will actually refer to one-level-up from your base link or “http://www.ccisolutions.com/page1.html”. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the syntax "../" (dot dot slash), but it means to go up one level from the current directory.
The use of base links for canonical linking might be useful for a CMS where the content is generally dynamically created. It might be good to sit down with your developers and discuss which tactic would be best for the site in question.
I am including a link to this SEOmoz blog post in case it is also of help.
Edit: expanded on the explanations...
-
Thanks George. Can you help me with what this means on a large site "
If your document specifies a base link, any relative links
will be relative to that base link." ? Does "document" refer to the entire site, or a single Web page? Thanks!
-
Hello Dana,
I suggest reading this over: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Midway down the page, Google states:
Can the link be relative or absolute?
rel="canonical"
can be used with relative or absolute links, but werecommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or
difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links
will be relative to that base link.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Google WMT/search console: Thousands of "Links to your site" even only one back-link from a website.
Hi, I can see in my search console that a website giving thousands of links to my site where hardly only one back-link from one of their page to our page. Why this is happening? Here is screenshot: http://imgur.com/a/VleUf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Can Google read content that is hidden under a "Read More" area?
For example, when a person first lands on a given page, they see a collapsed paragraph but if they want to gather more information they press the "read more" and it expands to reveal the full paragraph. Does Google crawl the full paragraph or just the shortened version? In the same vein, what if you have a text box that contains three different tabs. For example, you're selling a product that has a text box with overview, instructions & ingredients tabs all housed under the same URL. Does Google crawl all three tabs? Thanks for your insight!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlo76130 -
Best Way To Go About Fixing "HTML Improvements"
So I have a site and I was creating dynamic pages for a while, what happened was some of them accidentally had lots of similar meta tags and titles. I then changed up my site but left those duplicate tags for a while, not knowing what had happened. Recently I began my SEO campaign once again and noticed that these errors were there. So i did the following. Removed the pages. Removed directories that had these dynamic pages with the remove tool in google webmasters. Blocked google from scanning those pages with the robots.txt. I have verified that the robots.txt works, the pages are longer in google search...however it still shows up in in the html improvements section after a week. (It has updated a few times). So I decided to remove the robots.txt file and now add 301 redirects. Does anyone have any experience with this and am I going about this the right away? Any additional info is greatly appreciated thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tarafaraz0 -
Differences between "casas rusticas" and "casas rústicas"
Hi All, I've a client with this website: http://www.e-rustica.com/casas-rusticas It's a spanish realtor for special houses (rustic). We wanto it to be good posited as "casas rústicas" that it's the correct keyword and asl "casas rusticas" that it's like lot of people write it. Do you know if google see this two keywords as the same? Even we've done SEO for "casas rústicas" it's much better posited for "casas rusticas". Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbenzo_aficiona0 -
Webmaster Tools "Not found" errors after sitemap update
Hello Mozzers - I found a sitemap with loads of URL errors on it (none of the URLs on sitemap actually existed) so I went ahead and updated sitemap - now I'm seeing a spike in "not found" errors in WMT - is this normal / anything to worry about when you significantly change a sitemap. I've never replaced every URL on a sitemap before! L
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0 -
Rel=Canonical - needed if part duplication?
Hi Im looking at a site with multiple products available in multiple languages. Some of the languages are not complete, so where the product description is not available in that language the new page, with its own url in the other languages may take the English version. However, this description is perhaps 200 words long only, and after the description are a host of other products displays within that category. So say for example we were selling glasses, there is a 200 word description about glasses (this is the part that is being copied across the languages) and then 10 products underneath that are translated. So the pages are somewhat different but this 200 word description is copied thru different versions of our site. Currently, the english version is not rel=canonical, would it be better to add the english version where we lack a description and do the canonical option or in fact better to leave it blank until we have a translated description? As its only part of the onpage wording, would this 200 word subsection cause us duplication issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xoffie0 -
To "Rel canon" or not to "Rel canon" that is the question
Looking for some input on a SEO situation that I'm struggling with. I guess you could say it's a usability vs Google situation. The situation is as follows: On a specific shop (lets say it's selling t-shirts). The products are sorted as follows each t-shit have a master and x number of variants (a color). we have a product listing in this listing all the different colors (variants) are shown. When you click one of the t-shirts (eg: blue) you get redirected to the product master, where some code on the page tells the master that it should change the color selectors to the blue color. This information the page gets from a query string in the URL. Now I could let Google index each URL for each color, and sort it out that way. except for the fact that the text doesn't change at all. Only thing that changes is the product image and that is changed with ajax in such a way that Google, most likely, won't notice that fact. ergo producing "duplicate content" problems. Ok! So I could sort this problem with a "rel canon" but then we are in a situation where the only thing that tells Google that we are talking about a blue t-shirt is the link to the master from the product listing. We end up in a situation where the master is the only one getting indexed, not a problem except for when people come from google directly to the product, I have no way of telling what color the costumer is looking for and hence won't know what image to serve her. Now I could tell my client that they have to write a unique text for each varient but with 100 of thousands of variant combinations this is not realistic ir a real good solution. I kinda need a new idea, any input idea or brain wave would be very welcome. 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0