HTTPS in Rel Canonical
-
Hi,
Should I, or do I need to, use HTTPS (note the "S") in my canonical tags?
Thanks
Andrew
-
Thanks Alan all done so far so good thanks for your help
-
Yeah, definitely agree - the how/why of using https in general is a much broader and more difficult question.
You said the first link was http (not secure), but it looks like it redirects to a secure page? I'm not seeing any crawl issues, although I wonder if the combination of a footer link and the page looking like a lead-gen page is causing Google to ignore it. Honestly, though, it feels more like a technical issue. I'm not seeing any red flags, though.
-
in iis cp find the folder secure, slect ssl settings from the mail window, and tick "require https", they will now be forced to use https for that folder.
Next if you haven't already, using web platform installer, install url rewrite in IIS, best grab SEO toolkit while you are there. Restart IIS cp after install
Select the site then go to url rewrite,
click add rule
Select blank rule
fill in as per screen shots here
http://screencast.com/t/6qUxduZ7UxWz
http://screencast.com/t/cvivbdFsm
If any problems get back to me. I did this without testing.
If you installed seo toolkit also, you will see there are some ready built rules at bottom, see tutorials here if needed.http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials
Note with the rule remove append trailing slash, I always select remove as when people type out your url they never put a slash on the end.
When your done select the site again and have a play with the SEO toolkit, do a scan on your site.
let me know how you went
-
-
-
Hi Alan,
Thanks, we are using IIS, could you please explain how to do this further please. Do you think this maybe the cause of google not seeing and indexing HTTPS page?
Thanks
Andrew
-
In Microsoft IIS server you can require uses use https on a folder basis, you seem to want to force to not use https, this can be done by writing a urlrewrite rule.
If your site does not use https at all, then just remove the binging for SSL. If you have some https pages and some without then you need to do the above.
If you are using a lynix type server then you will have to look it up, if you are using
IIS I can show you how to do this. -
Hi
Thank you both for your responses. Alan your point is very interesting. The main reason for asking the question is because we are desperately trying to find a solution to why our HTTPS page is not being indexed by google 6 weeks after going live. There are 2 other SEOMoz posts by us that have not been able to answer this "Mystery"
www.seomoz.org/q/why-isn-t-google-indexing-our-site
www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-our-page-will-not-being-found-by-google
The HTTPS page in question HTTPS://www.invoicestudio.com/Secure/invoiceTemplate is in fact references via a link at the bottom of HTTP://www.invoicestudio.com (note no "S").
Alan could you please explain your answer further as I do not fully understand what you are saying but it sounds like the HTTP link to HTTPS maybe causing the issue and would like to explore further to solve this long standing issue that is very important to us.
Thanks
Andrew.
-
Dr Pete as usual is correct here, but I would ask a further question, is your page accessed from both http and https? if so I would make the page "https required" so it is not, and use a 301 if you all ready have links to http.
I work on Microsoft IIS servers this is very easy to do, not sure how you do it on lynix
-
If the canonical version of your URLs is secure (HTTPS), then yes - you should use absolute paths with "https://" in the them for your canonical tags.
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
-
Is there an advantage to using rel=canonical rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)?
Is there an advantage to using link rel=alternate (as recommended by Google) rather than noindex on pages on my mobile site (m.company.com)? The content on the mobile pages is very similar to the content on the desktop site. I see Google recommends canonical and alternate tags, but what are the benefits of using those rather than noindex?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Crawl Issue Found: No rel="canonical" Tags
Given that google have stated that duplicate content is not penalised is this really something that will give sufficient benefits for the time involved?Also, reading some of the articles on moz.com they seem very ambivalent about its use – for example http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questionsWill any page with a canonical link normally NOT be indexed by google?Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fdmgroup0 -
Rel="canonical" questions?
On our site we have some similar pages for example in our parts page we have the link to all the electrical parts you can see here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/53/160/Electrical and we have a very similar page going from our accessories page to electrical here http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/72/221/Electrical We are thinking about putting rel="canonical" from the accessories electrical page to the parts one. We would do this for several pages not just this one. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
Where to point Rel = Canonical?
I have a client who is using the rel=canonical tag across their e-commerce site. Here is an example of how it is set up. URLs 1. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.do?nType=22. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.doThe canonical tag points to the second URL. Both pages are indexed by Google.The first page has a higher page authority (most of the internal site links go to the first URL) than the second one. Should the page with the highest authority be the one that the canonical tag points to? Is there a better way to handle these situations? Does any authority get passed through the tag?Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Reducing pages with canonical & redirects
We have a site that has a ridiculous number of pages. Its a directory of service providers that is organized by city and sub-category of the vertical. Each provider is on the main city page, then when you click on a category, it will only show those folks who offer that subcategory of this service. example: colorado/denver - main city page colorado/denver/subcat1 - subcategory page There are 37 subcategories. So, 38 pages that essentially have the same content - minus a provider or two - for each city. There are approx 40K locations in our database. So rough math puts us at 1.5 million results pages, with 97% of those pages being duplicate content! This is clearly a problem. But many of these obscure pages do rank and get traffic. A fair amount when you aggregate all these pages together. We are about to go through a redesign and want to consolidate pages so we can reduce the dupe content, get crawl budget allocated to more meaningful pages, etc. Here's what I'm thinking we should do with this site, and I would love to have your input: Canonicalize Before the redesign use the canonical tag on all the sub-category pages and push all the value from those pages (colorado/denver/subcat1, /subcat2, /subcat3... etc) to the main city page (colorado/denver/subcat1) 301 Redirect On the new site (we're moving to a new CMS) we don't publish the duplicate sub-category pages and do 301 redirects from the sub-category URLs to the main city page urls. We'd still have the sub-categories (keywords) on-page and use some Javascript filtering to narrow results. We could cut to the chase and just do the redirects, but would like to use canonicalization as a proof of concept internally at my company that getting rid of these pages is a good thing, or at least wont have a negative impact on traffic. i.e. by the time we are ready to relaunch traffic and value has been transfered to the /state/city page Trying to create the right plan and build my argument. Any feedback you have will help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trentc0 -
How to set cannonical link rel to CS CART
I whant to specify a link rel cannonical for each category page, how to do that without changing the code (just from admin section), because filters and sorting search are making the site dublicate content with their parameters; If there is a way please specify the method, i whant to avoid hours of working in a script like this. Thank's.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oneticsoft0