Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
-
Hi!
I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL:
www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX
At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated.
My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates?
Can I fix all this with the canonical tag?
Thanks!
-
Hey Jorgediaz, first off I think it would be wise to add the canonical tags specifying the primary URL for all of your pages, additionally it wouldn't hurt to add the parameter in question to your Google webmasters tool letting Google know to ignore your affiliate parameters. You can find that in the Site Configuration settings under the 'parameter handling' tab.
I personally woudln't worry too much about the 'loss of link juice' since I think what Matt Cutts is talking about is more duplicate content that results from shopping carts that might serve up a very similar page based on a filter (such as re-ordering products by price). In my experience affiliate links aren't the greatest in the first place, many are probably even using your publisher ID sending the link to an intermediary source for tracking purposes, so to recap, if it were me I'd add the canonical, add the parameter in your webmaster tools and leave it at that.
Hope this helps.
-
How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content
We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience.1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.
_3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL._Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.
If you find you have duplicate content as mentioned above, can you help search engines understand your site?
First, no worries, there are many sites on the web that utilize URL parameters and for valid reasons. But yes, you can help reduce potential problems for search engines by:1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters -- keep the URL as clean as possible.
2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap's URL in search results, it's helpful to indicate the canonical preference.
-
But are we losing link juice without using the canonical tags right now?
-
Hi Jorge,
If I am not mistaken the /product-page would receive link juice for the links with ?afl=XXXXXX at the end. No need to worry.
-
You can use the canonical URL tag (i.e. rel="canonical") to instruct the search engines what the primary URL should be and avoid any duplicate content issues. You can also setup query parameter exclusions with the different search engine webmaster tools to instruct them to ignore these affiliate query parameters.
Regarding link juice, there is a video from Matt Cutts that suggests that there may a fractional loss of link juice with Canonical URL references, but nothing to be worried about. So to answer your question, you will still have link juice passed when using the canonical URL tag.
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
-
Homepage has canonical tag pointing to innerpage
Hi, I'm stuck! This e-commerce site which I'm currently working on has an unusual problem. So the homepage has a canonical tag pointing to one of its category pages. Is this okay SEO-wise? Based on what I understand, the homepage is the most important page in a site. And if there is a mirror duplication, it would be better to canonicalise the inner page to the homepage rather than in reverse. Looking forward to getting some answers. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nerdieb0 -
Original Source Tag or Canonical Tag for News Publishers?
I have been sourcing content from a news publisher who is my partner for publishing content online. My website deals with sourcing content from a couple of websites. I did use a canonical tag pointing towards the respective syndicated source but I have not seen traffic for those articles. I did some research and found out that Google does have a tag for news publishers which is the "original-source" tag which helps news publishers to give proper credit for their work. Here's a link to the official word by Google" https://news.googleblog.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html Although Google has officially stated that the "syndication-source" tag has been replaced by the "canonical" tag. However, there is no mention about the "original-source" tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Starcom_Search
Can I still use the "original-source" tag to syndicate content from my partner site instead of the "canonical" tag? P.S.: The reason why I am not convinced with the use of the canonical tag is because:
1. As per what Google says, duplicate content won't harm my website unless it is spam. (And since we are rightfully content from our partner'website and showcasing it to a larger audience by hosting it on our website as well, we are thereby not indulging in any unethical practices) 2. The canonical tag could possibly hamper my crawl bandwidth issues as it would essentially need the crawler to crawl the whole page to figure out that the canonical is present, post which any possible valuation that my site could have garnered gets lost.3. Moreover, since I am from the news, media and publication industry, content republication is a widely accepted practice and in such cases simply including a link to the original source of the article or using the original source tag should suffice, That being mentioned, I do not want to go ahead without taking a second opinion about this. Kindly help me to resolve this issue.0 -
Hreflang Tags & Canonicals Being Used
We have a site on which both hreflang tags and canonicals are being used. There are multiple languages, but for this I'll explain our problem using two. There are a ton of dupe page titles coming up in GSC, and we're not sure if we have an issue or not. First, the hreflang tags are implement properly. UK page pointing there, US page pointing there. Further down the page, there are canonical tags - except the UK canonical tag points to the UK page, and the US version points to the US page. I'm not sure if this will cause an issue in terms of SEO or indexing. Has anyone experienced this before or does anything have any insight into this? Thanks much! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
PR links
Its seems that at lot of or competitors are using PR site to place articles with links. They are using the same article across many sites with the same anchor text link - But they seem to be doing very well in the rankings.... I have steered away from this type of linking as I assumed Google wouldn't be keen on this type of activity but I seem to be wrong.... Any views on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jj34340 -
Canonical tag vs 301 in this Panda situation - trying to wrap my brain around this!
Here's the situation. Let's say you have a development site that was created on a subdomain such as examplesite.webdesign.com. When the new site, examplesite.com launches, the developer forgot to remove examplesite.webdesign.com from the index. As such, two copies of the site exist. Because the development site existed first, examplesite.com ends up being affected by Panda and drops out of the search results. As a result only the development site is visible on Google searches. I've been trying to wrap my head around whether using canonical tags or 301 redirects would be best. On one hand you could insert a canonical tag on each page of the subdomain to tell Google that the correct version to index is examplesite.com. On the other hand you could do a 301 redirect from every page of the development site to to examplesite.com. Now, here's where it gets complicated. Because the new site has been flagged as a Panda site, in either case will it need to see a Panda refresh in order to be included in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Could adding canonical tags to large Ecommerce site ever hurt rankings? Temporarily?
We have a really large site we're working on who's product pages rank well for the most part but also have multiple products listed in different categories with different URL's. I'm assuming there's no downside to adding canonical tags to these right? Its peak season so I don't want to do anything that could, even temporarily, bring down their rankings. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
H1 Tags
Quick and easy most likely - Just need to clear a few point. I understand each page within the site should only have one H1 tag which should be the most important one. I also believe these only effect google ranking very slightly? right? Currently my CMS is system is pulling the H1 tag in from the page and automatically using the page heading that is on the page IE) the heading used for the content. Should this be a keyword / key phrase instead? and will it be duplicate if i used the same one on various pages in my site? Cheers guys look forward to hearing your feedback
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850