Is it ok to add rel=CANONICAL into the desktop version on top of the rel="alternate" Tag (Mobile vs Desktop version)
-
Hi mozzers,
We launched a mobile site a couples months ago following the parallel mobile structure with a URL:m.example.com
The week later my moz crawl detected thousands of dups which I resolved by implementing canonical tags on the mobile version and rel=alternate onto the desktop version. The problem here is that I still also got Dups from that got generated by the CMS.
?device=mobile
?device=desktop
One of the options to resolve those is to add canonicals on the desktop versions as well on top of the rel=alternate tag we just implemented. So my question here:
is it dangerous to add rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags on the desktop version of the site or not? will it disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile?
Thanks
-
Thank you Stephanie
-
Hi Taysir,
Great question! Honestly, I'm not confident what would happen if you add the rel=canonical and rel=alternate tags to the desktop version (and whether that will disrupt the rel=canonical on mobile or not). My advice is to test it out on a few select pages (I would recommend not testing your most important/highest revenue driving pages first, but on less critical pages) and see how the search engines deal with these pages. If the duplicates are removed and traffic to the mobile site isn't affected, then I would start scaling the rel=canonical out on other pages. However if you do see an issue with the combination of rel=canonical and rel=alternate on the desktop version, then it may be worth fixing the CMS, so that it no longer creates these duplicate pages.
Best,
Stephanie
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
-
Mobile version of my sites: What is better?
What is the best approach to make my sites ready for mobile, in terms of SEO ? Is it better to create a subdomain called "m.mydomain.com" and redirect mobile users to that domain with a lite version of my sites? Or is it better to just keep the same domain as for my desktop version "mydomain.com" and use a WordPress theme that fits for all gadgets, for example Twenty Fourteen WordPress Theme, that adapts to each device? I see that most big sites use a "m.mydomain.com" subdomain for the mobile version, however, I don't see any sense in creating a subdomain of the site, when you can just use the WP adapting theme in the main domain. Any insight please? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BloggerGuy0 -
Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"
I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index. It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
"Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?
I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
yoast.com › Social Media
yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Pagination: rel="next" rel="prev" in ?
With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request. I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful. When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the . Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head? (Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss1 -
Canonical URL's - Do they need to be on the "pointed at" page?
My understanding is that they are only required on the "pointing pages" however I've recently heard otherwise.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
How permanent is a rel="canonical"?
We are rolling out our canonicals now, and we were wondering: what happens if we decide we did this wrong and need to change where canonicals point? In other words, how bad of a thing is it to have a canonical tag point to page a for a while, then change it to point to page b? I'm just curious to see how permanent of a decision we are making, and how bad it will be if we screwed up and need to change later. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoreyTisdale0