How to use canonical with mobile site to main site
-
I am pretty sure that the mobile version of the main site needs to be the same canonical link from what I understand. I am trying to find good docuementation that supports this. Even better if its from Google or Matt Cutts.
I have a main domain like http://www.mydomain.com
the mobile version of this is http://www.mydomain.com/m/
Should my canonical be
rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com"/>
for both these pages?
-
That's all this information i needed, on one easy read guide... thank you
-
Now that was a good answer
-
Sorry, Cesar - you're right, this thread went way off course.
My notes on 301 as preferred vs rel=canonical were strictly focused on potential "duplication issues" brought up by Federico as related to Desktop URLs. The 301, you're right, is the wrong tool for the job when it comes to Desktop/Mobile.
The page I linked to originally - here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details#separateurls - has the instructions you'd want to follow under "separate URLs."
To clarify with Google which page should be served to which search users (Desktop vs Mobile), you need 1) a rel=alternate tag pointing from Desktop to Mobile and 2) a rel=canonical tag pointing from Mobile to Desktop.
Effectively if you will have the same canonical for both versions - the Desktop home page. Whether or not you have rel=canonicaled the Desktop back to itself (again this doesn't accomplish much but it won't hurt you), the Mobile home page (following the instructions from Google) will be rel=canonicaled back to the Desktop home page.
And yes, if your Mobile home page has a lot of links pointing to it, using this setup should increase the overall authority and ability to rank of your Desktop home page. It will consolidate that link equity at the Desktop home page URL.
Both pages will remain indexed, but Google (learning from the rel=alternate tag) will serve up the Mobile home page only for mobile search users.
Hope that clarifies a bit. Disregard the discussion between Federico and I on the correct use of 301s in this thread, as it was off topic. In short, a 301 will not serve you well in this case. You want one of the three implementations recommended by Google on the page I linked to above (and in your case, the third option for separate URLs sounds best to me).
Best,
Mike -
I marked this as answered but as I read through it I realize that I am more confused.
As I understand a 301 is geared towards telling Google that a page has moved to the new URL permanently.
In my understanding if I were to 301 a mobile user to my mobile version of my homepage as a 301 then I am telling Google this has moved here permanently. Which technically is true for a mobile user but can this have an effect on ranking on the mobile side?
Since there is way less content on the mobile site I am afraid this can impact me on the desktop side.
To me is makes more sense to just redirect a user to the mobile version without a 301 so Google knows that this is simply a redirect and not a 301
Now along with that my original question was more of increasing ranking for my homepage site.
Since I have a separate canonical for both the desktop page as well as the mobile page, my original question was asking whether I should make the canonical on the desktop homepage the exact same as the mobile homepage. I noticed in Google that both desktop and mobile versions of my homepage are indexed. Is this normal?
If I had the same canonical for both pages would that potentially increase the ranking overall for my homepage, since my mobile version is more popular than my desktop version?
Hope that makes sense.
-
This video from Matt Cutts has some good points on that.
Granted we can't always run to the bank with Matt's advice. Google and Bing both handle rel=canonical pretty well these days, and most SEO/related tools have caught up and handle it properly as well. I've even heard some anecdotes from other SEOs that rel=canonical can work "even faster than a 301" in terms of passing page equity and getting alternate URLs dropped from the index.
But a 301 is the established, recognized method for redirection - not just for search engines, but users as well. It's a web standard, whereas rel=canonical is just approaching that status. You'll still find some tools/scrapers that don't yet handle a rel=canonical properly, which can cause some confusion.
Another potential though perhaps not terribly pervasive issue: for multiple home page URLs, for example, a canonical will mean users can still see/interact with the alternate versions, and therefor they can mistakenly link to those alternate versions. A rel=canonical, similar to a 301, loses a bit of PageRank/link equity in the pass. I'd prefer users see and link to one core version of my home page rather than rely on rel=canonical to pass the link value along.
-
You have a source that supports the 301 over canonical as the preferred method?
-
Hi Federico,
A 301 is still the preferred/recommended method to point alternative URLs with exactly the same content back to the core version.
A canonical can achieve this as well, but it's not the preferred, most foolproof method to consolidate link equity and avoid duplication.
A canonical of a URL to the exact URL itself, again, achieves nothing. I'm not suggesting it'll cause some kind of problem (Google/Bing have been able to handle this from the beginning without any "infinite loop" issues), just that this in itself doesn't solve anything.
What you'd want is a canonical tag on those other URLs pointing back to the preferred URL. If you have no way of serving up unique source code per URL variation, then a self-referential canonical would be acceptable. But a 301 would be my first choice.
Maybe splitting hairs a bit.
In the example here, we're talking about desktop vs mobile URLs and how to handle canonical/alternate tags between the two, so duplication issues are a bit off-topic.
Best,
Mike -
Hey Mike,
So basically if the page is unique and there's no other copy with another URL you shouldn't use the canonical tag in that unique page pointing to itself?
I know it's like saying "the original copy of this page is here" while "here" is the same page, but that solves lots of duplicate content issues that might arise while using URL rewrite.
-
Hi Cesar,
-
Adding a canonical tag to the home page pointing to itself does nothing. It can help if someone scrapes your site and republishes it (they will probably scrape the canonical tag too, rendering their scraped/published URL unable to rank and effectively passing any link juice back to you). Otherwise, no need to canonical a page to itself.
-
The best method to send Google the proper signals about the corresponding link between desktop and mobile versions of your pages is to do the following:
- Add a rel="alternate" tag on the desktop version that points to the mobile version
- Add a rel="canonical" to the mobile version that points to the desktop version
Google uses rel="alternate" to serve up pages uniquely suited to particular users. It's used for language/regional specific pages as well as mobile.
Documentation is here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details
Best,
Mike -
-
I guess not. What do you mean by "indexed differently"?
-
What happens to ranking in the aspect by placing the canonical to both pages does that potentially boost my ranking for my main site if my mobile site was indexed differently this whole time?
-
If the content is the same, within the desktop and mobile version yes. The rel=canonical only points the search engine about which page should be indexed. As the content is the same, indexing the main (desktop) page should do it, as you would need to redirect mobile traffic to the mobile version once they click in the result.
Hope that helps!
Here's a video from Matt Cutts about mobile content:
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
-
Creating a .cn site with the existing site content
Hi all, I'm planning to create a .cn site. If I simply translate the existing content on my site (.com.au) into Chinese, do you think Google will see the .cn site as a duplicate of the main site? Will this cause any duplicate content issues? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | QuantumWeb620 -
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Rel="Canonical"
Hi!, We´ve just launched a new website and on this web we are using a lot Call to Actions on every page of the web and all of this CTA`s goes to the same Landing Page. (Ej: http://www.landing page.com) The problem comes when Google says this Landing Page is duplicate content because we are using some parameters like, for instance, http://www.landing page.com/?fuente=Soporteensalesforce So now we have just 1 Landing Page but Google sees 13 pages, because of this parameters and Moz alerted me that Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Yesterday I put this on the head of the only Landing Page we have so Google can see it in the proper way, as just one landing, but I don´t know if it is enough or should I do anything else? What I put on the Head: Hope someone can help me about this because I´ve tried to find a solution and this is the only thing that came up to me, and don´t know if it´s the right thing. Thanks for your time!
On-Page Optimization | | Manuel_LeadClic0 -
Rel-canonical
Hi, I am a bit confused. A potential clients website has three versions: http://www. http:// http://dev. In each version they have used the rel=canonical back to each base version. So http://www." http://" http://dev." I would have expected duplicate content but I see only one version of the content when I check using "....." in Google. Using the site: tool I see that all three versions are indexed. When moving through the navigation on them, they all redirect to the one home page - the www version. Any idea what is going on and what should be recommended?Redirecting all versions to the www. version? Is it a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | AL123al0 -
Google Fonts & Site Speed
Hello, Does the use of one google font slow down a website enough to effect load speed and thus rankings? Here's the ones we're choosing from: www.google.com/webfonts How do we know if the one we choose is too slow? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Altering site structure
I work for a business that operates several sites that were developed a very long time ago. We've been making many different changes over the past 12-18 months to improve these sites in several different ways. One area that we've never discussed or attempted is general site structure. Its pretty obvious that when the business was started they had never heard of information architecture or usability design. To make matters worse, the internal linking strategy appears to have been link everything to everything. Well after being told that it couldn't be done - I'm getting our team to say we must focus on this, if for no other reason that to help consumers figure out how to navigate through our site. Today we essentially have a series of category / information pages. In some cases, we hang more detailed topical content related to a category /informational page in a hub and spoke manner. Although remember what I said about linking everything to everything. In reality there are a series of subtopics that should been designed for every category / informational area. Instead, what happened is in some cases the subtopic is integrated into the hub or category page, in other situations is hung off the page as a spoke page and in others the subtopic isn't even covered. The plan is to standardize - each category will have 'n' subtopics (~10-12, we're still working this out). From a navigational standpoint users will be able to easily navigate both across categories as well as subtopics within a category as well as between categories within adjacent/similar subtopics. This is essentially a grid if that makes sense. The question is this - we have some keywords that do well in SEO and many many more that do not and the trend has not been our friend. We're considering keeping the URLs of the pages associated with strong keywords the same within the nav structure, even though this might mean the URL for a spoke page will be inconsistent with the spoke page name from a different category. I don't see any real danger for pages that either are not associated with any ranking keywords or only very weak keywords. Maybe I'm wrong. What things should we consider in this change? We believe that this standardization should help consumers find the information they are looking for in a much more efficient manner, so page views/visit should go up. Additionally, this prepares us for category and subtopic comparison pages and other added functionality being added in a logical manner. We also think that as we add depth about a subtopic, it will be easier for us to acquire links to our site because the subtopics within a category will appeal to different websites. This is by no means a small project. We have hundreds and hundreds of pages. Do folks think this is a worthwhile endeavor? We've spent a lot of time cleaning up H1 tags, structure of our pages, anchor tags, page load order and speed, image caching, etc. Site structure, URL length and internal link structure are essentially what is left. Once these are done we intend to really get going on better and more organized content on our site. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Allstar1 -
Does anyone have any experience with using Altruik for optimizing a retail site?
Greetings - can anyone offer an opinion on the services of http://www.Altruik.com/? They claim to be able to effectively optimize the deep pages of online retailers. I welcome any and all feedback! Eric
On-Page Optimization | | Ericc220 -
Canonical home page
I have a site that shows duplicate page content for: www.autoserviceexpertsonline and www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html When looking at the files using the cms (intuit) file manager, I only see the /index.html version. I added the Caononical tag referencing/pointing to both the domain name only and then changed to .../index.html No matter how I code this, the seomoz On-Site SEO Grader still has a problem with it. Is this a bug with the Grading program or am I doing something wrong? Please help as I think this is causing me problems with Google and I'd like to get this right for future sites I will be working on. Thanks, Bill
On-Page Optimization | | Marvo0