Canonical Tags?
-
I read that Google will "honor" these tags if your website has two url's with duplicate content. The duplicate content does not show up in my SEOmoz crawls report but they do in the search engines and many of "non authoritative links" that are generated from my search feature j(ugly url's with % ...not real user friendly) are ranking higher than the "good URL" links.
So if I do the canonical tags I guess my higher ranking bad urls will drop. I even read that google might even completely overlook the links. I read somewhere that the best way to do this is with a 301 redirect...is that correct? I m ranking pretty good with my main keyword terms so I am afraid to make changes not knowing the effect. Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Boo
-
We strongly suspect that canonical tags lose a portion of link "juice" just like 301s do. Otherwise, they could be abused.
-
I can't debate one thing - we certainly don't have all the information, and that can lead to bad advice at times.
I disagree on a couple of points:
(1) User-friendly URLs can have both usability and SEO advantages, whether or not they're meant to be typed in directly. Typically, those advantages are minor, but descriptive URLs can certainly boost SEO a small degree.
(2) If your URLs have spaces in them, they are probably being converted in some cases to "%20" (that's the URL-encoded equivalent of a space). It's generally a bad idea to have internal URLs with spaces, and this can lead to minor problems. This explanation sounds a little dubious to me. I'd highly recommend you run an internal crawl with a tool like Xenu or Screaming Frog - you might turn up badly formed internal URLs. I can't prove that, but I'd check if it were me. Hyphens don't "turn into" spaces.
Overall, this reads to me like a list of excuses, not solutions.
-
Jake Madison mentioned this one time.
Any Redirect will lose value. A 301 loses a portion of your juice and a 302 gives you nothing. What the canonical tag does is redirect the authority of the page with the tag to the target page you want to hold the authority (usually the parent page, be it Root Domain, primary landing page or a subcategory page)
Google has a new fantastic tool I think everyone should know about called Google Tag Manager. It creates a container under the that you can fill with any tag, Google or non-Google tags. It is fantastic because you don't need your programer to go in and change anything and no need to access code. It gives the power to you to add and remove tags and define the parameters of each one you put in place. in addition it builds the tag for you if you aren't a code wizard. this makes the world of SEO and OSO shake due to the rainbows and sunshine of not having t bother your programer with little fixes like tag adding and removal.
I hope this helped!
Cheers!
-
Here is what my computer programmer told me...what do you think? (I was mistaken and thought the links were from our advanced search option but they are just links from other sites that are more authoritative than ours I guess. There's a few things here to address, I'm going to try to put it simply. If you want more details I can expound on it:
I think you aren't giving enough information here, and it could potentially cause people to give you bad advice. First off, URLs (generally speaking) aren't meant to be user friendly, unless the user is going to actually type it in. In your case, URLs with %20 in them are never meant to be typed, so it doesn't matter. Second, we don't supply URLs from the site using %20, so we can't do anything about those anyways. One possibility is that websites who are linking to yours have an algorithm that converts hyphens to spaces... and spaces get converted to %20 by many browsers and other internet services.
Second: Don't forget that when we first built the site, we didn't have the vanity URLs (the specialty names)... so the category links with the hyphens-turned-spaces-turned-%20 could very well just be happening because those pages are so much older than the vanity URLs, also, our outbound feeds used to use the old URLs too, so if we provided a feed to a site with those links, and they haven't bothered to update, then those links are still going to be out there. Google sees the links on your site, but they also see the links that come inbound from other sites, and that's why google still has the old URLs listed. The best way to fix this is to use the canonical meta link, to explain to google that the authoritative source is the vanity URL.
-
I tend to agree - these pages are often very low-value for Google and can spin out of control. The canonical tag is a great way to conslidate unavoidable duplicates, but in many cases it's better not to create them at all. Of course, these situations can be very complex, and it's tough to speak in generalities.
-
By search pages, I'm assuming these are automated pages being generated by users searching for things on your site? Pages like these can be seen as 'thin content' and could lead to a penalty from Google.
Also, the question to ask yourself is why are these pages outranking your actual content? Is it because you're linking to them more prominently? Then you'll want to improve your internal linking. Is it because they have a lot of content? Then add more content to your main pages. Is it because they target keywords that your main content doesn't? Then create content around the keywords that people are searching for.
-
Takeshi,
If I no index my higher ranking search links then I will not be ranked as high in google because those will fall completely off right. Are you saying just noindex them...let them fall out of the rankings and then focus long term on getting the main pages ranked above the search pages in order to avoid panda penalties. (I didn't even know I was doing anything wrong)
Boo
-
You want to use a canonical tag on your site if you have any duplicate content. The canonical tag basically tells Google and other search engines which version of the page is the original, or canonical version of the content.
If you're generating a lot of URLs via your search feature, that sounds like it may be a different problem than having a lot of duplicate content. Autogenerating a content via search results is always a risky proposition, which can get you more traffic in the short term, but could get you hit by Panda if it gets out of hand.
My advice would be to noindex the pages generated through search, and create actual high quality content pages for the queries you seem to be getting a lot of traffic for.
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
-
Canonical for multi store
Hello all, I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags; UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/ Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag? ie; UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/ (please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Are my language tags correct?
Hello, I have a Spanish website for Spanish speaking people es.example.com. I also have example.com for all English speaking people across the world. I want that users who go to google.es and search in English get our example.com site and others who search in Spanish on google.es get the Spanish site. Should the tags be like this: Or should we also have this tag aswell to specify? Otherwise we might only show the es.domain even for english queris? :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
301s Or Stick With Canonical?
Hello all! A nice interesting one for you on this fine Friday... I have some pages which are accessible by 2 different urls - This is for user experience allowing the user to get to these pages in two different ways. To keep Google happy we have a rel canonical so that Google only sees one of these urls to avoid duplicates. After some SEO work I need to change both of these urls (on around 1,000 pages). Is the best way to do this... To 301 every old url to every new url Or... To not worry as I will just point the indexed pages to the new rel canonical? Any ideas or suggestions would be brilliant. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB170 -
Canonical Tag for Pages with Less Content
I am considering using a cross-domain canonical tag for pages that are very similar but one has less content than the other. The domains are geo specific, so for example. www.page.com - with content xxx, yyy, zzz, and www.page.fr with content xxx is this a problem because while there is clearly duplicate content here the pages are not actually significantly similar since there is so much less content on one page than the other?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Is link juice passed through a 301 and a canonical tag?
Hi all, I am led to believe that link juice does not pass through more than one 301 redirect, however what about a 301 and then a canonical meta tag? Here is an example: subdomain.site.com/uk/page/ -> 301 -> **www.**site.com/uk/page/ www.site.com**/uk/**page/ -> canonical -> www.site.com/page/ Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Further
Chris0 -
REL canonicals not fixing duplicate issue
I have a ton of querystrings in one of the apps on my site as well as pagination - both of which caused a lot of Duplicate errors on my site. I added rel canonicals as a php condition so every time a specific string (which only exists in these pages) occurs. The rel canonical notification shows up in my campaign now, but all of the duplicate errors are still there. Did I do it right and just need to ignore the duplicate errors? Is there further action to be taken? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0