High level rel=canonical conceptual question
-
Hi community. Your advice and perspective is greatly appreciated.
We are doing a site replatform and I fear that serious SEO fundamentals were overlooked and I am not getting straight answers to a simple question: How are we communicating to search engines the single URL we want indexed?
Backstory: Current site has major duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical is not used. There are currently 2 versions of every category and product detail page. Both are indexed in certain instances. A 60 page audit has recommends rel=canonical at least 10 times for the similar situations an ecommerce site has with dupe urls/content.
New site: We are rolling out 2 URLS AGAIN!!! URL A is an internal URL generated by the systerm. We have developed this fancy dynamic sitemap generator which looks/maps to URL A and creates a SEO optimized URL that I call URL B. URL B is then inserted into the site map and the sitemap is communicated externally to google. URL B does an internal 301 redirect back to URL A...so in an essence, the URL a customer sees is not the same as what we want google to see.
I still think there is potential for duplicate indexing. What do you think?
Is rel=canonical the answer?
In my research on this site, past projects and google I think the correct solution is this on each customer facing category and pdp:
The head section (With the optimized Meta Title and Meta Description) needs to have the rel-canonical pointing to URL B
example of the meta area of URL A:What do you think? I am open to all ideas and I can provide more details if needed.
-
Yes, if you redirect URL B, it will not be indexed as content. It will be ignored by Google.
Well... Not ignored, but Google will acknowledge the URL B shouldn't be indexed.
-
Hi guys. I have researched and discussed further.
According to your thoughts, the rel=canonical and 301 redirect in the description in the original post will conflict with each other.
In all honestly, I stated that rel=canonical is being used (I am fighting for it) but it is not in the future state plan.
I will restate a similar situation (with what I think the same outcome is). If we 301 redirect URL B (optimized in sitemap) back to URL A (system generated) without rel=canonical then ultimately we are saying "don't index URL b"???
-
I will verify the fine details of the internal 301 redirect. The entire process as described to me seems a bit fishy also. The developers keep saying "the site map is the only thing that will be indexed" which we know is false.
Ultimately the real solution was getting URL A to be the most optimized.
Thanks, and more to com
-
HI,
I think you are going to have problems as you describe it (if I understood it correctly). 301s and canonicals are not the same thing, the 301 is actually taking you to the second page, the canonical is suggesting which page you want to be considered the main page to index. In your case you are declaring pageB in the sitemp, 301ing that to pageA and then recommending pageB be considered the main page (which is 301ing back to pageA again). The results of that is difficult to predict to say the least. I would think the most likely result is your pageA results being indexed, but only after making life difficult for googlebot et al by running them through this loop.
Is there no chance of fixing the cms so that the pageB urls can be displayed properly without a 301?
-
I don't understand the purpose of the 301 redirect. If you are redirecting your fancy URL, that is "SEO optimized"-- then you are doing nothing. The only thing that will be indexed will be the non-fancy URL. If you 301 redirect anything, that page will not be indexed, so making a keyword-rich URL is useless. Instead, I would use only canonical tags.
So, for example, let's say you have a product page. And it's at example.com/product-name/
But it's also in other places example.com/tags/vases/product-name/
General accepted SEO practices would say that all of the additional or supplemental pages should have the rel=canonical point to the "original." (Not redirected back to the original.)
However, because Google seems to be favoring breadcrumbs more than ever-- you might want to pick a page with breadcrumbs (Page B) and make that page the canonical. You could try it both ways with different products and see how it goes.
Now, please bear in mind that I just thought of this as I was answering your question, and this is just something to think about- I haven't actually tried this, but I might...
In other words, if I had:
example.com/400-watt-halide-bulb/
but I also had it in:
example.com/light-bulbs/halide/400-watt-halide-bulb/
I might point all examples of that product to the longer, breadcrumbed URL with the canonical link. But again, just thinking out loud.
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 -
Merging two sites to one Rel Can Question
Hi All, We have 2 brands (1 main 1 product as a satellite domain) that we're merging into our main brand. When doing a 301 redirect - should we redirect everypage of the product satellite to the new site or is 1 main redirect fine? I'm Confusing ....yep. Ill do an E.G www.nike.com & www.air-jordan.com we are now shutting down www.airjordan.com and will be migrating all the content to www.nike.com/air-jordan Just of course there will be other pages like air-jordan.com/order-now . Should i do a rel can from air-jordan.com/order-now to www.nike.com/air-jordan/order-now ? Or is simply a 301 from www.airjordan.com to www.nike.com/air-jordan sufficient? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU0 -
Metatags on drupal question
Hi Im quite inexperienced on drupal (normally an umbraco user!) and im having some difficulty with the Metatags on the CMS. I have been applying Meta Title and descriptions to the individual pages however they only appear when i preview the page and not when the page is saved. When i go into the metatag section located at /admin/config/search/metatags i am given a list of settings including Global: Front Page and Node. Im sure the reason it keeps defaulting the metatags back is to do with this but im not sure what to change to apply my own Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheZenAgency1 -
Ecommerce Internal Linking Questions
I am a bit confused at internal linking for ecommerce site. Is it wise to link say all "boots" term in the review section to the boots page? Zappos is doing this. Wouldn't this incur penguin penalty? Since all internal anchor to that page is "boots" ? Scroll down to the bottom and checkout their reviews: http://www.zappos.com/tony-lama-6071l Is this the wise way to go about doing internal linking? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WayneRooney0 -
Canonical OR redirect
Hi, i've a site about sport which cover matches. for each match i've a page. last week there was a match between: T1 v T2 so a page was created: www.domain.com/match/T1vT2 - Page1 this week T2 host T1, so there's a new page www.domain.com/match/T2vT1 - Page2 each page has a unique content with Authorship, but the URL, Title, Description, H1 look very similar cause the only difference is T2 word before T1. though Page2 is available for a few days, on site links & sitemap, for the search query "T2 T1 match" Page1 appears on the SERP (high location). of course i want Page2 to be on SERP for the above query cause it's the relevant match. i even don't see Page2 anywhere on the SERP and i think it wasn't indexed. Questions: 1. do you think google see both pages as duplicated though the content is different? 2. is there a difference when you search for T1 vs T2 OR T2 vs T1 ? 3. should i redirect 301 Page1 to Page2? consider that all content for Page1 and the Authorship G+ will be lost. 4. should i make rel=canonical on Page1 to Page2? 5. should i let google sort it out? i know it's a long one, thanks for your patience. Thanks, Assaf
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stassaf0 -
Canonical Issue need hep
Hi Is my site has any issue with duplicate pages within the site , have i define my canonical tag properly , can any one advise please help. childrensfunkyfurniture.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
Rel="prev" and rel="next" implementation
Hi there since I've started using semoz I have a problem with duplicate content so I have implemented on all the pages with pagination rel="prev" and rel="next" in order to reduce the number of errors but i do something wrong and now I can't figure out what it is. the main page url is : alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/ and for the other pages : alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/p2/ - for page 2 alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/p3/ - for page 3 and so on. We've implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" according to google webmaster guidelines without adding canonical tag or base link in the header section and we still get duplicate meta title error messages for this pages. Do you think there is a problem because we create another url for each page instead of adding parameters (?page=2 or ?page=3 ) to the main url alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente?page=2 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dan_panait0 -
Sitemap.xml Question
I am pretty new to SEO and I have been creating new pages for our website for niche terms. Should I include ALL pages on our website in the sitemap.xml or should I only have our "main" pages listed on the sitemap.xml file? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | threebiz0