Do different meta titles & descriptions delete the canonical origin?
-
Hi,
hopefully anyone knows something about this case:
There is a canonical tag on site "www.xyz.com**/de_de/" **refering to site "www.xyz.com/de-de/".
If the meta title and descriptions are different on both sides - is there a problem that google will not pay attention to the canonical tag?
Do both sides need the same title and canonical?
Thanx for your answers!
Cheers Heiko!
-
Even if the content on two different pages is identical, there's always a chance Google will not honour the canonical (though this is rare in my experience).
To use rel="canonical" the majority of the content on both pages should be the same, so if only the title and meta description are different it shouldn't matter.
Ideally you should 301 (permanent) redirect one of the pages to the other, if possible. Is there any particular reason you have the two pages?
Further information on rel="canonical": http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
I hope that 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
-
Title Length Vs Keywords
Hello all, I've been talking with an SEO expert who convinced me to add more keywords to my titles of a section of our site which is updated with products daily. I can see the logic and I do prefer having these additional keywords. The problem now is in Moz it says we have over 2,000 pages with title elements that are too long, which is true they are all over the 70 character limit. Is this a problem SEO wise? Speaking to our SEO expert they said it's not ideal from a user point of view as you can't see the full title, but are we going to be upsetting Google by having 150+ character titles? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB171 -
Google is not honoring my descriptions
I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants. This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages. An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ... Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both. I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly. What can I do to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Duplicate meta descriptions
Hi All Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility. Thanks in Advance. Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Problems with Squarespace Title Tags
Hi All, I'm having problems editing the title tags on individual pages on Squarespace. It seems the only way to do it is via the page title name. Here is an example: http://www.autismsees.com/research/. The page is called research, so it makes that the meta title. The problem is I want to keep research on the page and the Meta Title be: Autism Spectrum Research. I'v tried searching over the web, but no luck so far. Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Microformats & Microdata
Hi, Does splitting data apart using microformats & Microdata, help Google better understand your content and in turn could be used to increase relevancy? O and does anyone know if it's supported across major browsers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Meta Revisit?
Hi there, We have just migrated to a new website with a new design etc and I have noticed that we now have this code on our website: From my understanding this is telling search engines to come back to your website in 10 days time to crawl the website? I'm sure I have read on serveral occasions that you should not does this and let search engines crawl your site when it see's fit to do so? Hope someone can help me out on this Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Canonical, 301 or code a workaround?
Hi, Recently I've been trying to tackle an issue on one of my websites. I have a site with around 400 products and 550 pages total. I've been pruning some weaker pages and pages with shallow content, and it's been working really well. My current issue is this: There are about 20 store brands of 6 products on my site that each have their own page. They are identical products just re-branded. Writing content for each of these pages has been difficult, as it's a fairly dry product too. So I have around 120 pages of dry content that is unique but not much different from one another. I want to consolidate but I am not sure how yet. Here is what I am thinking: 1. 301 - I pick one product page as the master, 301 all the other duplicate products to it and then make one page of great content that encompasses all of them. If the 301 juice gets diluted over time I might miss out on some long tails, but I could also gain a lot more from a great content page with 500+ words of really good content as opposed to pages with 150-250 words of just so so content. 2. Canonical - Similar to above. I pick a master page and canonical the other pages to it. Then I could use the great content on all the pages, and still have pages for the specific products. The pages might not show up in search engines but would still be searchable on my site. 3. Coded solution - In my CMS I could always make a workaround where the products still appear on the brands page (just their name with a link to the product page) but all the links direct to a master page. I realize all the solutions are fairly similar, although I am not sure which is ideal. Option 3 is the most expensive/time consuming but it would drop my page total down to around 450 pages. For a while now (dating back to before Panda) I've been trying to get rid of the low quality and outdated product pages so I could focus on the more popular and active pages. Dropping my page total would also help in the SEO efforts as the sheer volume of pages that need links right now is high, and obviously the less pages I have the more time I can spend on each page (content and link building). So what do you think? Should I do any of the 3, a combination of the 3 or something different? Cheers, Vinnie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vforvinnie0 -
Wordpress Titles
My question is about long url titles, my client is using wordpress and the rankings are going well apart from two, which for some reason just wont move. After using some of the tools available on SEO moz which i have found very helpful I have spotted a re-occuring warning throughout the site, the titles, in word press you have this setting (below) page title : %page_title% | %blog_title% My question is my client has quite good brand online but I done want to impact this. The problem I have is that I have a Keyword in the title then the clients company name which is three words and takes up a lot of space. I am thinking about removing this but in two minds so i was kinda hoping for a bit of advice as this looks like a standard in wordpress. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820