Canonical question
-
I have at least three duplicate main pages on my website:
www.augustbullocklaw.com/index
I want the first one, www.augustbullocklaw.com to be the main page. I put this code on the index page and uploaded it to my site: http://www.augustbullocklaw.com/canonical-version-of-page/" rel="canonical" />
This code now appears on all three pages shown above. Did I do this correctly?
I surmise that www.augustbullocklaw.com is pointing to itself. Is that ok?
I don't know how to take the cononical code off the page that is the page I want to be the main page. (I don't know how to remove it from www.augustbullocklaw.com, but leave it on www.augustbullocklaw.com/index and augustbullocklaw.com)
Thanks
-
Thank you very much for that clear answer!
-
Hi August,
You've made a small error; it looks like you've used the rel canonical example from here; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. The "canonical-version-of-page" there is supposed to be an example of a folder on the site and shouldn't be literal, so the code on your page should be:
Where the value inside the 'href' part is the URL to the page you wish to be the canonical version. I hope that makes sense!
What Francisco is suggesting is an alternative, and often preferred, method of handling this scenario, where a user trying to visit the other (non-canonical) versions of this URL would be redirected automatically by their browser to the canonical version. This does have some advantages but I'd say it isn't significant enough for you to worry about.
Best of luck!
-
301 redirects within .htaccess. I don't have a step by step because you can google it and get the code.
-
I can't understand that at all.
Are you (or someone) able to explain step by step what to do.
How exactly does one point the non-www to the www?
-
This is an .htaccess issue. You want to point the non-www to the www. This is not a canonical issue.
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
-
General SSL Questions After Move
Hello, We have moved our site to https, Google Analytics seems to be tracking correctly. However, I have seen some conflicting information, should I create a new view in analytics? Additionally, should I also create a new https property in Google search console and set it as the preferred domain? If so, should I keep the old sitemap for my http property while updating the sitemap to https only for the https property? Thirdly, should I create a new property as well as new sitemaps in Bing webmaster? Finally, after doing a crawl on our http domain which has a 301 to https, the crawl stopped after the redirect, is this a result of using a free crawling tool or will bots not be able to crawl my site after this redirect? Thanks for all the help in advance, I know there are a lot of questions here.
Technical SEO | | Tom3_150 -
Geo Targeting Content Question
Hi, all First question here so be gentle, please My question is around geo targeted dynamic content; at the moment we run a .com domain with, for example, an article about running headphones and then at the end - taking up about 40% of the content - is a review of some people can buy, with affiliate links. We have a .co.uk site with the same page about running headphones and then 10 headphones for the UK market. Note: rel alternative is used on the pages to point to each other, therefore (hopefully) removing duplicate content issues. This design works well but it involves having to build links to two pages, in the case of this example. What we are thinking of doing is to just use the .com domain and having the product page of the page served dynamically, ie, people in the UK see UK products and people in US see US products. What are people's thoughts on this technique, please? From my understanding, it wouldn't be any problem with Google for cloaking etc because a googlebot and a human from the same country will see the same content. The site is made in Wordpress and has <....html lang="en-US"> (for the .com) in the header. Would this cause problems for the page ranking in the UK etc? The ultimate goal of doing this would be to reduce link building efforts by halving the number of pages which links would have to be built for. I welcome any feedback. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | TheMuffinMan0 -
Questions about canonicals
Howdy Moz community, I had a question regarding canonicals. I help a business with their SEO, and they are a service company. They have one physical location, but they serve multiple cities in the state. My question is in regards to canonicals and unique content. I hear that a page with slightly differing content for each page won't matter as much, if most of the content is relevantly the same. This business wants to create service pages for at least 10 other cities they service. The site currently only have pages that are targeting one city location. I was wondering if it was beneficial to use a template to service each city and then put a canonical there to say that it is an identical page to the main city page? Example: our first city was san francisco, we want to create city pages for santa rosa, novato, san jose and etc. If the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, city were the same content as the 1st city, but just had the slight change with the city name would that hurt? Would putting a canonical help this issue, if i alert that it is the same as the 1st page? The reason I want to do this, is because I have been getting concerns from my copywriter that after the 5th city, they can't seem to make the services pages that much different from the first 4 cities, in terms of wording of the content and its structure. I want to know is there a simpler way to target multiple cities for local SEO reasons like geo targeted terms without having to think of a completely new way to write out the same thing for each city service page, as this is very time consuming on my end. Main questions? Will making template service pages, changing the city name to target different geographic locations and putting a canonical tag for the new pages created, and referring back to the main city page going to be effective in terms of me wanting to rank for multiple cities. Will doing this tell google my content is thin or be considered a duplicate? Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
Hi all & happy new near! I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice: I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern: Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp. I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
Technical SEO | | AlexSG
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locations Any opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa? I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot! Best regards from Singapore!0 -
Can I canonical the same page?
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page. Example: http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65 I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages - When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Question about creating friendly URLs
I am working on creating new SEO friendly URLs for my company website. The products are the items with the highest search volume and each is very geo-specific
Technical SEO | | theLotter
There is not a high search volume for the geo-location associated with the product, but the searches we do get convert well. Do you think it is preferable to leave the location out of the URL or include it?0 -
Duplicate Content Question (E-Commerce Site)
Hi All, I have a page that ranks well for the keyword “refurbished Xbox 360”. The ranking page is an eCommerce product details page for a particular XBOX 360 system that we do not currently have in stock (currently, we do not remove a product details page from the website, even if it sells out – as we bring similar items into inventory, e.g. more XBOX 360s, new additional pages are created for them). Long story short, given this way of doing things, we have now accumulated 79 “refurbished XBOX 360” product details pages across the website that currently, or at some point in time, reflected some version of a refurbished XBOX 360 in our inventory. From an SEO standpoint, it’s clear that we have a serious duplicate content problem with all of these nearly identical XBOX 360 product pages. Management is beginning to question why our latest, in-stock, XBOX 360 product pages aren't ranking and why this stale, out-of-stock, XBOX 360 product page still is. We are in obvious need of a better process for retiring old, irrelevant (product) content and eliminating duplicate content, but the question remains, how exactly is Google choosing to rank this one versus the others since they are primarily duplicate pages? Has Google simply determined this one to be the original? What would be the best practice approach to solving a problem like this from an SEO standpoint – 301 redirect all out of stock pages to in stock pages, remove the irrelevant page? Any thoughts or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Justin
Technical SEO | | JustinGeeks0