Should we use the rel-canonical tag?
-
We have a secure version of our site, as we often gather sensitive business information from our clients.
Our https pages have been indexed as well as our http version.
-
Could it still be a problem to have an http and an https version of our site indexed by Google? Is this seen as being a duplicate site?
-
If so can this be resolved with a rel=canonical tag pointing to the http version?
Thanks
-
-
Agreed - this is generally an issue with relative paths, and job one is to fix it. In most cases, you really don't want these crawled at all. I do think rel=canonical is a good bet here - 301 redirects can get really tricky with http/https, and you can end up creating loops. It can be done right, but it's also easy to screw up, in my experience.
-
-
Yes, having 2 versions of the same content can be seen duplicate content and could cause issues.
-
Yes, include a canonical tag in the header (assuming both http & https pages are close to identical). This will help Google's crawler figure out which version of the page to show in the search results.
-
-
Yes, would suggest canonical as the easiest resolution -
And Irving is right PDF's are most definitely indexed, I am not sure how they are interpreted and if they would specifically count a dup content, but not sure this idea would EVER be something i would suggest as it it seems to have lots of negative repercussions.
I would most definitely agree that relative links is probably your issue, and if you canonical and remove inline relative links and make them http absolute this should resolve itself in a month or so.
-
I disagree
a) pdfs are both indexed AND read by crawlers.
b) even if you don't have navigation to the file sometimes Google can find it if it's in a folder that you are not blocking in robots.txt.
c) if someone links to it once on the web it's getting crawled and indexed.
If you have a https section that content should be behind a login and not accessible to the engines. Your problem sounds like your https pages have relative links on them and Google is crawling the https page and then following the relative links staying on https so you need to fix that and this will fix your site getting http pages indexed as dupe https.
Absolute http canonical tags will help but it not the solution. you need to fix the https leaking on your secure pages.
.
-
You can "no-index" them within the html - but if you really want a fun trick - when and if you are not able to get around mass amount of duped content and it isn't for the sake of rankings - example, MLS listings, etc
Change the content into a pdf - or file format - thus not being able to be crawled.
Once again - it will NOT be crawled - so don't go doing this to an entire site
But maybe your clients confidential data - can be submitted this way - and it will not get indexed - except for the subpage - but then you can no index that subpage.
Hope this helps.
Your pal
Chenzo
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
-
Internal Clicks and CTR. Is REL=canonical better than Noindex in this case?
I currently have a search facility in a website that noindexes the search results which is ok. But when you click one of the results it takes you to a product which is noindexes as it has URL params. e.g. https://www.visitliverpool.com/accommodation/albion-guest-house-p305431?bookurl=%2Fbook-online%3Fstage%3Dunitsel%26isostartdate%3D2017-10-31%26nights%3D1%26roomReq_1_adults%3D1%26NumRoomReqs%3D1%26fuzzy%3D0%26product%3D305431 The product also exists as this which is indexed : - https://www.visitliverpool.com/accommodation/albion-guest-house-p305431 Should I canonicalise is this instance instead of no index? Does CTR apply to internal links? i.e. Does search console consider internal clicks? Are internal clicks a ranking factor?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew-SEO0 -
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 -
Review site using canonical tag in a puzzling way.
Have just been looking at a review site and they're using the canonical tag very strangely, to me. For example, they may have several pages of reviews of the same item - they use the canonical tag on page 2/3/4 to point back at page 1 - and yet there is no duplication between the pages. Any idea why they might be doing this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Parallax and Title Tags
I've noticed an issue with our site, which uses parallax on multiple pages. Here is an example: If you search for About SQL Sentry, you get the correct title tag and description If you search for SQL Sentry Careers (which is on the about us page) it appears that Google has made up a title tag and description for it. Is there any way to force a separate title tag for a part of a parallax page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
Using rel cannonical to host a blog as a path on our e-commerce website
There has been recent suggestion (from Rand) that hosting your blog as a folder rather than a subdomain is much better from an SEO point of view. Unfortunately, our blog is hosted on a subdomain with a different technology stack to the main e-commerce site. We are finding it quite tricky to migrate to a folder given the different technologies. Is the following a suitable solution? - 301 redirect from mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post to blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post - And then put mysite.com/blog/cool-blog-post" /> on blog.mysite.com/cool-blog-post Would be great to have your thoughts on this guys - I can't figure out if it will work or be an SEO fail.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HireSpace0 -
How far can I push rel=canonical?
My plan: 3 sites with identical content, yet--wait for it--for every article whose topic is A, the pages on all three sites posting that article will have a rel=canonical tag pointing to Site A. For every article whose topic is B, the pages on all three sites posting that article will have a rel=canonical tag pointing to Site B. So Site A will have some articles about topics A, B, and C. And for pages with articles about A, the rel=canonical will point to the page it's on. Yet for pages with articles about B, the rel=canonical will point to the version of that article on site B. Etc. I have my reasons for planning this, but you can see more or less that I want each site to rank for its niche, yet I want the users at each site to have access to the full spectrum of articles in the shared articles database without having to leave a given site. These would be distinct brands with distinct Whois, directory listings, etc. etc. The content is quality and unique to our company.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Need help in Title tags
Hi I have word press site and it has 24 pages and the main keywords is Stairlifts there are various kind and type of stairlifts and all the 24 page has the title tag stairslifts , i have tried to make each unique but i cannot avoid using the keyword stairslift. Will that have a negative impact if my main keyword is stairlifts. My target page for stairlifts is the home page. Any suggestions please Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
tags inside <a>tags - is this bad?</a>
Hi, I'm currently redesigning my website, and in many places, I've now decided to make links a little bit more obvious for the user, using tags within a <a>tag in order to make the entire block of text clickable. I was just wondering if this could have a negative impact in the search engines. My gut feeling is no, since I'm actually improving usability, but I guess it could have an impact on how Google looks at the anchor text? An example of the HTML is as follows: </a> <a></a> <a></a> [Cristal Night Club Hotels <address>1045 5th Street
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjk26
Miami Beach, FL33139</address> 6.4 miles from Miami Dade County Auditorium](http://localhost:8080/frontend/venue-hotels/cristal-night-club-hotels/301022 "Hotels near Cristal Night Club") Thanks for your thoughts and comments, Best wishes Mike0