High level rel=canonical conceptual question

[mm916157]

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.

[MikeGeorge]

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.

[mm916157]

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"???

[mm916157]

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

[LynnPatchett]

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?

[MikeGeorge]

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.