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
-
[Advice] Dealing with an immense URl structure full of canonicals with Budget & Time constraint
Good day to you Mozers, I have a website that sells a certain product online and, once bought, is specifically delivered to a point of sale where the client's car gets serviced. This website has a shop, products and informational pages that are duplicated by the number of physical PoS. The organizational decision was that every PoS were supposed to have their own little site that could be managed and modified. Examples are: Every PoS could have a different price on their product Some of them have services available and some may have fewer, but the content on these service page doesn't change. I get over a million URls that are, supposedly, all treated with canonical tags to their respective main page. The reason I use "supposedly" is because verifying the logic they used behind canonicals is proving to be a headache, but I know and I've seen a lot of these pages using the tag. i.e: https:mysite.com/shop/ <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop https:mysite.com/shop/productA <-- https:mysite.com/pointofsale-b/shop/productA The problem is that I have over a million URl that are crawled, when really I may have less than a tenth of them that have organic trafic potential. Question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles-O
For products, I know I should tell them to put the URl as close to the root as possible and dynamically change the price according to the PoS the end-user chooses. Or even redirect all shops to the main one and only use that one. I need a short term solution to test/show if it is worth investing in development and correct all these useless duplicate pages. Should I use Robots.txt and block off parts of the site I do not want Google to waste his time on? I am worried about: Indexation, Accessibility and crawl budget being wasted. Thank you in advance,1 -
Previously owned domain & canonical
Hi, I've recently joined the business and as part of the cleanup process I got told that we owned this domain preferredsafaris.com with some very similar content to our main site southernafricatravel.com. We're no longer owns the preferredsafaris.com domain but looking at Google's cache for it we realised that the title, meta description & page shown when looking at the 'cached page' is for our current domain even though it is showing the 'correct' URL there. I imagine this might have something to do with canonical set on those pages but the weird thing is all those pages now render 404 & do not show a canonical in the source code. I have used Google Removal Tool https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals for all those URLs & Google says that it has removed them & yet they're still showing. What do you suggest? Any potential issue in regards to duplicate content here? Cheers, Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SouthernAfricaTravel0 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
Using PushState for Meta Data?
Wondering if anyone has had any experience using pushstate to update meta data on a AJAX page. What we are trying to is have one really long page that users can scroll through to see different portfolio pieces. We want each portfolio piece to be represented in Google as a separate page when they are technically all on the same page. An example of how the page will work is here:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lsujoe
http://www.scozzese.com/2011/en/#annasafroncik If you notice you scroll down and the url will update for the next piece but you are still on the same page. So if we do this for meta title, meta description - will Google be able to recognize it? Any help to achieve quality results would be helpful! If I didn't explain anything clearly please let me know!0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
Canonical Fix Value & Pointer To Good Instructions?
Could you tell me whether the "canonical fix" is still a relevant and valuable SEO method? I'm talking about the .htaccess (or ISAPI for Microsoft) level fix to make all of the non-www page URLs on a website redirect to the www. version - so that SEO "value" isn't split between the two. I'm NOT talking about the newer <rel= canonical="" http:="" ...="">tag that goes in the HEAD section on an HTML page - as a fix for some duplicate content issues (I guess). </rel=> I still hear about the latter, but less about the former. But the former is different than the latter right - it doesn't replace it? And I'm not sure if the canonical fix is relevant to a WordPress-based website - are you? Also I can never find any page or article on the Web, etc. that explains clearly how to implement the canonical fix for Apache and Microsoft servers. Could you please point me to one? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DenisL0 -
Page titles
Hi Guys, Hope your all well and business is good. I have been going through and changing page titles for my site which is currently huge attracting massive amounts of traffic. However from my pro membership i have notice a lot of the rankings in Google search engine has decreased. I have been using a strategy that i read on SEOMoz which is; example Keyword | Page heading | company name Is this why? if so what is the best method? I have changed nothing else so far.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850