Can I use rel=canonical and then remove it?
-
Hi all!
I run a ticketing site and I am considering using rel=canonical temporary.
In Europe, when someone is looking for tickets for a soccer game, they look for them differently if the game is played in one city or in another city.
I.e.:
"liverpool arsenal tickets" - game played in the 1st leg in 2012
"arsenal liverpool tickets - game played in the 2nd leg in 2013
We have two different events, with two different unique texts but sometimes Google chooses the one in 2013 one before the closest one, especially for queries without dates or years.
I don't want to remove the second game from our site - exceptionally some people can broswer our website and buy tickets with months in advance.
So I am considering place a rel=canonical in the game played in 2013 poiting to the game played in a few weeks. After that, I would remove it.
Would that make any sense?
Thanks!
-
I would create a generic canonical "/tickets/liverpool_arsenal" which lists the upcoming games. I would create unique canonicals/titles with event information for each game.
Use a 302 to redirect to the most appropriate content (i.e. the upcoming game).
-
Just remember that rel canonical is a suggestion to Google rather than an order and can still be overlooked.
Have you thought about a 302 temporary redirect instead? This will guarantee the correct page is viewed.
Andy
-
Thanks for the answer Andy. We already have them
But Google just chooses wronlgy sometimes. When the user add the date to the query, i.e.: "arsenal liverpool 2012 tickets" then the result is the right one. But for generic searches like: "arsenal liverpool tickets" Google sometimes picks the next event and some other times the one in 2013. -
I would be tempted to look at adding some Schema.org metadata in there Jorge. You can setup dates and event specific information that will give you a new rich snippet result in Google - have a look at the Sports Events on Schema.org. This is what they are there for
Andy
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
-
Important category pages that can and should be found in SERP but can not be reached by navigating on the webshop itself
Hi, On a webshop we are optimizing, the main navigation consists of the 5 main categories to which all of the products can be assigned. However, the main tabs in the navigation just activate a drop down with all of the subcategories. For example: the tab in the navigation is 'Garden equipment' and when you click on this tab, the drop down is shown with subcategories like 'Lawn mowers', 'Leaf blowers' and so on. Now, the page 'Garden equipment' is one of the main category pages and we want this page to rank of course. This shouldn't be a problem, since there is a separate URL for this page that can be indexed and that can be reached through internal links on the website. However, this page can not be reached when a visitor initially comes on the homepage of the webshop, since the tab in the navigation isn't clickable. This page will only be reached when a subcategory is selected, and then when the visitor goes back to the category page through the breadcrumb or through an internal link. Is it a problem that these important overview category pages can not be reached immediately? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C0 -
No content using Fetch
Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser. So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view. The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it. There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL. How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
6 .htaccess Rewrites: Remove index.html, Remove .html, Force non-www, Force Trailing Slash
i've to give some information about my website Environment 1. i have static webpage in the root. 2. Wordpress installed in sub-dictionary www.domain.com/blog/ 3. I have two .htaccess , one in the root and one in the wordpress
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NeatIT
folder. i want to www to non on all URLs Remove index.html from url Remove all .html extension / Re-direct 301 to url
without .html extension Add trailing slash to the static webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Force trailing slash to the Wordpress Webpages / Re-direct 301 from non-trailing slash Some examples domain.tld/index.html >> domain.tld/ domain.tld/file.html >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/file.html/ >> domain.tld/file/ domain.tld/wordpress/post-name >> domain.tld/wordpress/post-name/ My code in ROOT htaccess is <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / #removing trailing slash
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)/$ $1 [R=301,L] #www to non
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(([a-z0-9_]+.)?domain.com)$ [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] #html
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [NC,L] #index redirect
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://domain.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .html
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ /$1 [R=301,L]</ifmodule> The above code do 1. redirect www to non-www
2. Remove trailing slash at the end (if exists)
3. Remove index.html
4. Remove all .html
5. Redirect 301 to filename but doesn't add trailing slash at the end0 -
302 to a page and rel=canonical back to the original (to preserve url juice)?
Bit of a weird case, but let me explain. We use unbounce.com to create our landing pages, which are on a separate sub-domain (get.domain.com).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dragonlawhq
Some of these landing pages have a substantial amount of useful information and are part of our content building strategy (our content marketers are able to deploy them without going through the dev team cycle). We'd like to make sure the seo page-juice is counting towards our primary domain and not the subdomain.
(It would also help if we one day stop using unbounce and just migrate our landing page content to our primary website). Would it be an SEO faux-pas to do the following:
domain.com/awesome-page ---[302]---> get.domain.com/awesome-page
get.domain.com/awesome-page ---[rel=canonical]---> domain.com/awesome-page My understanding is that our primary domain would hold all the "page juice" whilst sending users to the unbounce landing page - and the day we stop using unbounce, we just kill the redirect and host the content on our primary domain.0 -
Merging two sites to one Rel Can Question
Hi All, We have 2 brands (1 main 1 product as a satellite domain) that we're merging into our main brand. When doing a 301 redirect - should we redirect everypage of the product satellite to the new site or is 1 main redirect fine? I'm Confusing ....yep. Ill do an E.G www.nike.com & www.air-jordan.com we are now shutting down www.airjordan.com and will be migrating all the content to www.nike.com/air-jordan Just of course there will be other pages like air-jordan.com/order-now . Should i do a rel can from air-jordan.com/order-now to www.nike.com/air-jordan/order-now ? Or is simply a 301 from www.airjordan.com to www.nike.com/air-jordan sufficient? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU0 -
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
Hey there Mozzers, Another question about a forum issue I encountered. When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use rel="next" rel="prev" or rel="previous" But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called Rel="self" What that does is simple. If i have 3 pages http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3 **instead of this ** On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2 On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3: it creates this On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 I also have the same page at http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1 Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough? Should I change that?0 -
Spam Links? -115 Domains Sharing the Same IP Address, to Remove or Not Remove Links
Out of 250 domains that link to my site about 115 are from low quality directories that are published by the same company and hosted on the same ip address. Examples of these directories are: -www.keydirectory.net -www.linkwind.com -www.sitepassage.com -www.ubdaily.com -www.linkyard.org A recent site audit from a reputable SEO firm identified 125 toxic links. I assume these are those toxic links. They also identified about another 80 suspicious domains linking to my site. They audit concluded that my site is suffering a partial Penguin penalty due to low quality links. My question is whether it is safe to remove these 125 links from the low quality directories. I am concerned that removing this quantity of links all at once will cause a drop in ranking because the link profile will be thin with only about 125 domains remaining that point to the site. Granted those 125 domains should be of somewhat better quality. I am playing with fire by having these removed. I URGENTLY NEED ADVICE AS THE WEBMASTER HAS INITIATED STEPS TO REMOVE THE 125 LINKS. Thanks everyone!!! Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Does google can read the content of one Iframe and use it for the pagerank?
Beginners doubt: When one website has its content inside Iframe's, google will read it and consider for the pagerank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0