Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"
-
I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ?
All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page.
My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category.
For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx
Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section :
The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place.
For this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories.
If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated !
Thanks
-
Thank you for your answer and suggestions. Google indexed the one without the context, but I think the one with context should be better.
301 redirect is not possible since we want the article to show up in other categories and keep the visitors in the section he was before the click.
-
Hard to say really and I would judge on a case-by-case basis myself.
I would look at several factors, including: what search terms are bringing viewers to these pages, which pages viewers are landing on (from google) more frequently, etc.
My guess would be the latter URL would be bringing in a wider array of keywords due to the "expand your sales" and "going global international markets" portion of the URL, but I'd have to see GA to really know for certain and then check out the keyword tool to figure what terms are being searched more frequently.
Somebody else might have another way of looking at this, but that's how I'd go about it. I didn't actually look at the pages, but if it is feasible the best possible scenario would be to 301 one to the other..
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
-
No Follow & Rel Canon for Product Filters
Our site uses Canonicals to address duplicate content issues with product/facet filtering. example: www.mysite.com/product?color=blue Relcanon= www.mysite.com/product However, our site is also using no follow for all of the "filters" on a page (so all ?color=, etc. links are no follow). What is the benefit of utilizing the no follow on the filters if we have the rel canon in place? Is this an effort to save crawl budget? Are we giving up possible SEO juice by having the no follow and not having the crawler get to the canonical tag and subsequently reference the main page? Is this just something we just forget about? I hope we're not giving up SEO juice by
Technical SEO | | Remke0 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
"Extremely high number of URLs" warning for robots.txt blocked pages
I have a section of my site that is exclusively for tracking redirects for paid ads. All URLs under this path do a 302 redirect through our ad tracking system: http://www.mysite.com/trackingredirect/blue-widgets?ad_id=1234567 --302--> http://www.mysite.com/blue-widgets This path of the site is blocked by our robots.txt, and none of the pages show up for a site: search. User-agent: * Disallow: /trackingredirect However, I keep receiving messages in Google Webmaster Tools about an "extremely high number of URLs", and the URLs listed are in my redirect directory, which is ostensibly not indexed. If not by robots.txt, how can I keep Googlebot from wasting crawl time on these millions of /trackingredirect/ links?
Technical SEO | | EhrenReilly0 -
Rel="author" showing old image
I'm using http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to test my rel="author" tag which was successful, but I noticed I wanted to change my image in Google+ as it is not what I want. I changed my image in Google+, it's been over 14 hours now and still not showing the new picture using the RichSnippets tool. I know Google can take a couple weeks at least to show changes in search results, but this RichSnippet tool I thought was immeidate. Am I missing something here or am I just impatient? I want my new photo to show.
Technical SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
Regarding Rel Canonical on PhoneTech.dk
Hi All you Seo Experts from seomoz I have a question about one of my webshops where I have the same product listed in different categories where I on the duplicate pages use the Rel Caninical Tag on, that points to the main product url. I just have to verify with you guys that I did it correctly Example on the shop. This is just an example www.phonetech.dk/shop/product1.html - This is Main Duplicates www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3G/product1.html - Canonical Tag on this one pointing to the main. www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3g/backcovers/product1.html - Canonical Tag on this one pointing to the main. www.phonetech.dk/shop/iphone3gs/colorbackcovers/product1.html - Canonical Tag here also pointing to main Hope you guys can help me that my use of Canonical Tag is correct. Regards Christian - Denmark
Technical SEO | | noerdar0 -
How is a dash or "-" handled by Google search?
I am targeting the keyword AK-47 and it the variants in search (AK47, AK-47, AK 47) . How should I handle on page SEO? Right now I have AK47 and AK-47 incorporated. So my questions is really do I need to account for the space or is Google handling a dash as a space? At a quick glance of the top 10 it seems the dash is handled as a space, but I just wanted to get a conformation from people much smarter then I at seomoz. Thanks, Jason
Technical SEO | | idiHost0 -
A rel="canonical" to www.homepage.com/home.aspx Hurts my Rank?
Hello, The CMS that I use makes 3 versions of the homepage:
Technical SEO | | EvolveCreative
www.homepage.com/home.aspx homepage.com homepage.com/default.aspx By default the CMS is set to rel=canonical all versions to the www.homepage.com/home.aspx version. If someone were to link to a website they most likely aren't going to link to www.homepage.com/home.aspx, they'll link to www.homepage.com which makes that link juice flow through the canonical to www.homepage.com/home.aspx right? Why make that extra loop at all? Wouldn't that be splitting the juice? I know 301's loose 1-5 % juice, but not sure about canonical. I assume it works the same way? Thanks! http://yoursiteroot/0 -
Rel - canonical vs 301 redirect
I have multiple product pages on my site - what is better for rankings in your experiance? If I 301 the pages to 1 correct version of the product page - or if I rel caanonical to the one correct page?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610