Effect of rel canonical on links
-
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page?
For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a
How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
-
Nice video.
Keep in mind rel=canonical is designed for pages which presently basically the same content. For example if you sell widgets then you might have a page sorted by price ascending, another by price descending, another by color, etc. All of these pages show the same content presented slightly differently. Often the links on each page will be identical.
-
FYI everyone, I've only just come across this video where Matt Cutts (kind of) deals with this question:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQzUixVCzo
Just because a page is rel canonical'd to another page does not mean Google will not crawl those links.
-
I can't say I've analyzed this in detail, but I would believe since rel=canonical is meant to be used to denote extremely similar content or even content that is exactly the same, that the way it handles links on the B page shouldn't matter, since this should be essentially the exact same as the content on the A page.
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
-
Rel=canonical on Godaddy Website builder
Hey crew! First off this is a last resort asking this question here. Godaddy has not been able to help so I need my Moz Fam on this one. So common problem My crawl report is showing I have duplicate home pages www.answer2cancer.org and www.answer2cancer.org/home.html I understand this is a common issue with apache webservers which is why the wonderful rel=canonical tag was created! I don't want to go through the hassle of a 301 redirect of course for such a simple issue. Now here's the issue. Godaddy website builder does not make any sense to me. In wordpress I could just go add the tag to the head in the back end. But no such thing exist in godaddy. You have to do this weird drag and drop html block and drag it somewhere on the site and plug in the code. I think putting before the code instead of just putting it in there. So I did that but when I publish and inspect in chrome I cannot see the tag in the head! This is confusing I know. the guy at godaddy didn't stand a chance lol. Anyway much love for any replies!
Technical SEO | | Answer2cancer0 -
Updating inbound links vs. 301 redirecting the page they link to
Hi everyone, I'm preparing myself for a website redesign and finding conflicting information about inbound links and 301 redirects. If I have a URL (we'll say website.com/website) that is linked to by outside sources, should I get those outside sources to update their links when I change the URL to website.com/webpage? Or is it just as effective from a link juice perspective to simply 301 redirect the old page to the new page? Are there any other implications to this choice that I may want to consider? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Liggins0 -
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this: <a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href="" Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
Rel Canonical Crawl Notices
Hello, Within the Moz report from the crawl of my site, it shows that I had 89 Rel Canonical notices. I noticed that all the pages on my site have a rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on. Specific example from my site is as follows: http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment has a Rel Canonical tag <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment" />. Is this self reference harmless and if so why does it create a notice in the crawl? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Need help with rel canonical!
I have a client who's MOZ crawl is coming back with 62 "notices" about rel canonical. Is this bad? On the report, it lists the url, then "Tag Value" as the home page.....what does this mean exactly? Are they pointing all the pages to the home page? I think I have 301 and rel can confused....
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Is the seomoz on-page factor :Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical working properly?
I have a word press site with a rel canonical plug in. The rel="canonical" href= is there and the url in there works and goes to the actual page.So why does the seomoz keep giving the warning: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Technical SEO | | CurtCarroll0 -
Canonical tags
Hi there, I have just noticed that SEOmoz picked up some duplicates links that I would like to resolve but not sure how. For example, the "Finding work in the arts" article has two links: http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Website&utm_content=Finding+work+in+the+arts&utm_campaign=Footer+Links Both links can be found on this page http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/industry-news-views/article/what-employers-are-looking-for (see attachment). Would automatically generated canonical tags by the CMS solve this issue? rmxiP
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0