Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
-
Hello,
7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed.
Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters?
I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed.
Thanks.
-
Thanks.
I think I will monitor for the next 2-3 weeks, and if there still is a lot of unwanted URLS with parameters in the index, I will start requesting removals.
-
You have two options here:
Let Google sort it out (which they will -- but it may take time)
Remove the unnecessary URLs yourself via Webmaster Tool's URL removal tool.
-
Hi Andrea,
yep - we did that.
7 days ago, we implemented the canonical tags because URLs such aswww.example.com/widget?color=blue
www.example.com/widget?size=largewere being indexed, along with the 'real' URL
We resubmitted the sitemap (which has all the 'real' URLs) as well.
At this time, many URLs with parameters are still indexed. I guess after reading this article:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
I was expecting the change to happen a little quicker...
I just want to confirm no other action is needed on our part.
I understand canonical tags would tell the crawlers which page to index when it finds them for the first time, but I also wanted to confirm that if all URLs are already indexed (because, at the time, no canonical tags were present) implementing the tags would be enough to have the unwanted URLs removed automatically from the index. -
A week isn't very long. It can take Google months to recrawl and drop URLs from an index. Google will figure it out, you just need to give it time. If you haven't done so, update your sitemap to include the tagged pages and resubmit via Google. That will signal them to recrawl your site and could speed up the process.
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
-
Can adding thousands of new indexable URLs to my site at once be a problem?
Hi everyone, I am currently working on a project that will quickly add thousands of new indexable URLs to my site. For context, the site currently has over a million indexable pages. Is there any danger of adding a few thousand URLs at once to the site? Could it potentially affect crawlability/SEO/other pages? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | StevenLevine0 -
301 Redirect Url Within a Canonical Tag
So this might sounds like a silly question... A client of mine has a duplicate content issue which will be fixed using canonical tags. We are also providing them with an updated URL structure meaning rwe will be having to do lots of 301 redirects. The URL structure is a much larger task that than the duplicate content so i planned to set up the canonicals first. Then it occurred to me id be updating the canonical tags with the urls from the old structure which brings me to my question. Will the canonical tags with the old urls redirect credit to the new urls with the 301? Or should i just wait until we have the new url structure in place and use these new urls in the canonicals? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Why google removed my landing pages from index?
I made new website meko.lv. I put many work to it, to make page SEO friendly, sprites, reduced requests added SSL, got google page speed insights score 100/100, but in 2. october all pages in google webmasters disappeared from index. Could you please look at website and say whats wrong with it? They are all search results present in google but for how long. it is so annoying, you put so many work but in result get high spam score. It is obvious that new pages can not get good links in one month https://meko.lv/ google webmasters google page speed score: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeko.lv%2F&tab=mobile q1LDHTn
Technical SEO | | Mekounko0 -
Rel=canonical - Identical .com and .us Version of Site
We have a .us and a .com version of our site that we direct customers to based on location to servers. This is not changing for the foreseeable future. We had restricted Google from crawling the .us version of the site and all was fine until I started to see the https version of the .us appearing in the SERPs for certain keywords we keep an eye on. The .com still exists and is sometimes directly above or under the .us. It is occasionally a different page on the site with similar content to the query, or sometimes it just returns the exact same page for both the .com and the .us results. This has me worried about duplicate content issues. The question(s): Should I just get the https version of the .us to not be crawled/indexed and leave it at that or should I work to get a rel=canonical set up for the entire .us to .com (making the .com the canonical version)? Are there any major pitfalls I should be aware of in regards to the rel=canonical across the entire domain (both the .us and .com are identical and these newly crawled/indexed .us pages rank pretty nicely sometimes)? Am I better off just correcting it so the .us is no longer crawled and indexed and leaving it at that? Side question: Have any ecommerce guys noticed that Googlebot has started to crawl/index and serve up https version of your URLs in the SERPs even if the only way to get into those versions of the pages are to either append the https:// yourself to the URL or to go through a sign in or check out page? Is Google, in the wake of their https everywhere and potentially making it a ranking signal, forcing the check for the https of any given URL and choosing to index that? I just can't figure out how it is even finding those URLs to index if it isn't seeing http://www.example.com and then adding the https:// itself and checking... Help/insight on either point would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | TLM0 -
Blocked URL parameters can still be crawled and indexed by google?
Hy guys, I have two questions and one might be a dumb question but there it goes. I just want to be sure that I understand: IF I tell webmaster tools to ignore an URL Parameter, will google still index and rank my url? IS it ok if I don't append in the url structure the brand filter?, will I still rank for that brand? Thanks, PS: ok 3 questions :)...
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Showing duplicate content when I have canonical url set, why?
Just inspecting my sites report and I see that I have a lot of duplicate content issues, not sure why these two pages here http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch http://www.thecheapplace.com/wholesale-products/small-wholesale-patches-1/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch are showing as duplicate content when both pages have a clearly defined canonical url of http://www.thecheapplace.com/Are-you-into-casual-sex-patch Any answer would be appreciated, thank you
Technical SEO | | erhansimavi0 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
ECommerce Site, URL's, Canonical and Tracking Referral Traffic
I'm very, very new to eCommerce websites that employ many different URL's to track referral traffic. I have a client that has 18 different URL's that land on the Home Page in order to track traffic from different referral sources. For example: http://erasedisease.com/?ref=abot - Tracks traffic from an affiliate source http://erasedisease.com/?ref=FB01 - Tracks traffic from a FB Ad http://erasedisease.com/?ref=sas&SSAID=289169 - Tracks more affiliate traffic ...and the list goes on and on. My first question is do you think this could hinder our Google rankings? SEOMoz Crawl doesn't show any Duplicate Content Errors, so I guess that's good. I've just been reading a lot about Canonical Url's and eCommerce sites, but I'm not sure if this is a situation where I'd want to use some kind of canonical plugin for this Wordpress website or not. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!!
Technical SEO | | Linwright0