Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
-
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain.
We have set up different rel="alternative codes like:
The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com?
For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to:
Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html -
I'm honestly not completely clear on what the different URLs are for - I'd just add a note to keep the core difference between canonical and 301s in mind. A canonical tag only impacts Google, and eventually, search results. A 301 impacts all visitors (and moves them to the other page). A lot of people get hung up on the SEO side, but the two methods are very different for end-users.
As Tom said, if these variations have no user value, you could consolidate them altogether with 301s. I always hesitate to suggest it without in-depth knowledge of the site, though, because I've seen people run off and do something dangerous.
-
What's the purpose of the URL if there's not even any sorting or anything unique going on? If's a sorted URL (say by "size" smallest-largest for /little leage/ URL) it might be actually useful to develop some unique category content to let the page rank separately.
If the content is totally unique, I don't think you could really go wrong redirecting. To be safe, I'd probably rely on analytics to answer the question "what impact will redirection have?" For instance, is there a difference in conversion rate between the URLs. If you see a conversion bump from a more specific URL, you might want to sleuth out what's causing it.
-
Would you worry about it if the categories are somewhat useful for users to drill down the content?
For example:
/product.html
/aluminum-baseball-bats/product.html
/little-league-baseball-bats/product.htmlThey don't sell bats but it is the easiest way to describe it I guess. In this cause would you still 301 redirect the two longer urls to /product.html
-
Yes, providing that the /category1/ and /category2/ heirarchy doesn't help the user experience (e.g. product segmentation based on say, color and brand, which would be useful for users to drill down to).
I like 301s better because they are permanent, non-ambiguous, respected by all engines, and chiefly because they eliminate the possibilty of inlink dillution because the redirected URLs are never seeen.
-
Yeah, don't use rel=canonical for the same purpose as rel=alternate - the canonical tag will override the alternate/lang tag and may cause your alternate versions to rank incorrectly or not at all. It can be a bit unpredictable. If you only wanted one version to show up in search results, then rel=canonical would be ok, but rel=alternate is a softer signal to help Google rank the right page in the right situation. It's not perfect, but that's the intent.
As for multiple canonicals like what you described, that's essential like chaining 301-redirects. As much as possible, avoid it - you'll lose link equity, and Google may just not honor them in some cases. There's no hard/fast limit, and two levels may be ok in some cases, but I think it's just a recipe for trouble long-term. Fix the canonicals to be single-hop wherever possible.
-
Thanks that is what I was thinking, I just need to know more about if the bots will follow the canonical's past one level when pointing to a different domain and if so how many levels on the different sites.
-
Interesting idea, I might have to do that. Right now I have canonical elements on the .com
It is a magento store so it creates dirty duplicate content when the products are in different categories out of the box, for example magento creates the following product pages:
domain.com/store/productcategory1/product.html
domain.com/store/productcategory2/product.html
domain.com/store/product.htmlIn this case I have canonical elements pointing the categories to the main root domain.com/store/product.html
So you think it would be better to do a 301 redirect for the different product urls that are in subcategories?
-
Miles,
On your last question, I'm wondering if those two canonical tags are necessary? Are the /sub/ versions of those pages necessary for user experience? If not, I'd add a canonical element to the .com version, then redirect the /sub/product.html to /product.html. That would help you avoid splitting link authority.
-
Hey Miles,
The both are for different uses and may or may not be used in the same page depending on your situation.
If the content in the CA and COM versions is the same, then you should add a rel canonical + rel alternate, the rel alternate pointing to itself and the other version of it, and the canonical pointing to the one you consider definitive.
If the content isn't the same, then the rel canonical isn't needed (but suggested, pointing to itself in each lang/alternate), only the alternate should be in place.
You can read more on Dr. Pete's post here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Hope that helps!
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
-
Canonical and Alternate Advice
At the moment for most of our sites, we have both a desktop and mobile version of our sites. They both show the same content and use the same URL structure as each other. The server determines whether if you're visiting from either device and displays the relevant version of the site. We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph. Would the way of us doing it at the moment be correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits3 -
Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages. To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index. Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner0 -
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
Hey there Mozzers, Another question about a forum issue I encountered. When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use rel="next" rel="prev" or rel="previous" But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called Rel="self" What that does is simple. If i have 3 pages http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3 **instead of this ** On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2 On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3: it creates this On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 I also have the same page at http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1 Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough? Should I change that?0 -
When is it recommended to use a self referencing rel "canonical"?
In what type of a situation is it the best type of practice to use a self referencing rel "canonical" tag? Are there particular practices to be cautious of when using a self referencing rel "canonical" tag? I see this practice used mainly with larger websites but I can't find any information that really explains when is a good time to make use of this practice for SEO purposes. Appreciate all feedback. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results
Hi , One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kadel
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is "PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif ) Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason) I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif) Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"? Thanks in advance,
Kadel0 -
Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.
I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site. Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point) It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages. love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mark_baird0 -
How Rel=Prev & Rel=Next work for me?
I have implemented Rel=Prev & Rel=Next tag on my website. I would like to give example URL to know more about it. http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=3 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=4 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=5 Right now, I have blocked paginated pages by Robots.txt by following query. Disallow: /*?p= I have removed disallow syntax from Robots.txt for paginated pages. But, I have confusion with duplicate page title. If you will check all 3 pages so you will find out duplicate page title across all pages. I know that, duplicate page title is harmful for SEO. Will Google crawl + index all paginated pages? If yes so which page will get maximum benefits in organic ranking? Is there any specific way which may help me to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0
