Canonical Expert question!
-
Hello,
I am looking for some help here with an estate agent property web site. I recently finished the MoZ crawling report and noticed that MoZ sees some pages as duplicate, mainly from pages which list properties as page 1,2,3 etc. Here is an example:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=3 etc etcNow I know that the best practise says I should set a canonical url to this page:
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=allbut here is where my problem is.
http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 contains good written content (around 750 words) before the listed properties are displayed while the "page=all" page do not have that content, only the properties listed.
Also http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 is similar with the originally designed landing page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses
I would like yoru advise as to what is the best way to can url this and sort the problem. My original thoughts were to can=url to this page http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses instead of the "page=all" version but your opinion will be highly appreciated.
-
Do "/houses" and "/houses?page=1" have exactly the same content? I'd definitely want to see rel=canonical on the "page=1" version - those are just duplicates. Google has expressly said that they don't want you to canonical pages 2, 3, etc. back to page 1. That doesn't mean it never works, just that it's a bit dicey.
As Chris said, rel=prev/next is another option. Theoretically, it would allow all of the results pages to rank, but let Google know they're a series and not count them against you as thin content. In practice, even my enterprise SEO colleagues have mixed feelings. There's just very limited evidence regarding how effective it is. It is low-risk.
The other option is to go a bit more old-school and META NOINDEX anything with "page=", and just let the original version get indexed and rank. This can help prevent any dilution and would also solve your "page=1" issue. The biggest risk here is if that cut off PR flow across your site or if you had links to the paginated results. In most cases, that's unlikely (people don't link to or tweet page 17 of your search results), but it's a case-by-case thing.
Unfortunately, the "best" solution can be very situational, and even Google isn't very clear about it.
-
It would work but the content after that e.g http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=2 would but lost as they would not be indexed. so if there is content on those pages you feel is valuable might want to look int alternatives however is the strongest content is on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses you will be fine to set that as the tag location.
-
i have but i was hoping to know if this is solved by adding rel=canonical to the original content landing page? http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses
all page have same content but the text content for some reason appears only on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses page and on http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com/property-for-rent/london/houses?page=1 page
-
Have you considered the paginated tag ? you could also have a page with a view all option and canonical to that and thus get all the content listed. Why wouldn't the view all page have the same content as each 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
-
Subdomain Question
Having a difficult time on our site and looking for some advice. Our site pages are indexed perfectly, however, we have a subdomain where we have all of our images and PDF's. We only have the main domain set-up in Search Console with our sitemap. We can't seem to get any of our images indexed by Google that are in the subdomain however all the PDF's are indexed. My thought is to add the subdomain to SC and create a new sitemap that is just for the subdomain. Assuming we are not blocking any folders or files with our robots.txt can anyone think of any other reasons why the images wouldn't get indexed.
Technical SEO | | cbathd
Thanks0 -
Question re: spammy internal links on site
Hi all, I have a blog (managed via WordPress) that seems to have built spammy internal links that were not created by us on our end. See "site:blog.execu-search.com" in Google search results. It seems to be a pharma-hack that's creating spammy links on our blog to random offers re: viagra, paxil, xenical, etc. When viewing "Security Issues", GSC doesn't state that the site has been infected and it seems like the site is in good health according to Google. Will anyone be able to provide any insight on the best necessary steps to take to remove these links and to run a check on my blog to see if it is in fact infected? Should all spammy internal links by disavowed? Here are a couple of my findings: When looking at "internal links" in GSC, I see a few mentions of these spammy links. When running a site crawl in Moz, I don't see any mention of these spammy links. The spammy links are leading to a 404 page. However, it appears some of the cached version in Google are still displaying the page. Please lmk. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks all! Best,
Technical SEO | | hdeg
Sung0 -
Rel=canonical on landing page question
Currently we have two versions of a category page on our site (listed below) Version A: www.example.com/category • lives only in the SERPS but does not live on our site navigation • has links • user experience is not the best Version B: www.example.com/category?view=all • lives in our site navigation • has a rel=canonical to version A • very few links and doesn’t appear in the SERPS • user experience is better than version A Because the user experience of version B is better than version A I want to take out the rel=canonical in version B to version A and instead put a rel=canonical to version B in version A. If I do this will version B show up in the SERPS eventually and replace version A? If so, how long do you think this would take? Will this essentially pass page rank from version A to version B
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Canonicals being ignored
Hi, I've got a site that I'm working with that has 2 ways of viewing the same page - a property details page. Basically one version if the long version: /property/Edinburgh/Southside-Newington/6CN99V and the other just the short version with the code only on the end: /6cn99v There is a canonical in place from the short version to the long version, and the sitemap.xml only lists the long version HOWEVER - Google is indexing the short version in the majority of cases (not all but the majority). http://www.website.com/property/Edinburgh/Southside-Newington/6CN99V"> Obviously "www.website.com" contains the URL of the site itself. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | squarecat.ben0 -
Site command / Footprint Question
Hi All, I am looking for websites with keywords in the domain and I am using: inurl:keyword/s The results that come back include sub-pages and not only domains with the keywords in the root domain. example of what i mean: www.website.com/keyword/ What I want displayed only: www.keyword/s.com Does anyone know of a site command i can use to display URL's with keywords in the root domain only? Thanks in Advance Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Pagination question
I have a website http://www.example.com with pagination series starting with page1.html upto page10.html. With backlinks to some of the pages ( page1.html, page2.html----page7.html). If i include rel="next" and rel="prev" on page1.html to page10.html pages. Will value of those links will be transfered to http://www.example.com This is what i interpret from http://bit.ly/mUOrn2 Am i right ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Should Canonical URLs be used in Wordpress?
Wordpress offers Canonical URLs in the "All in one SEO" settings. I know that canonical tags for page content will cause the search engine to ignore the content, but I don't understand this setting in Wordpress. The Canonical URLs box for my blog had been checked until a couple weeks ago. I unchecked it (removing the canonical tag) and now I have about 300 duplicate content pages acccording to my SEOMoz reports. It appears that it's just the blog tag in the url now that is causing the confusion. Here's an example of the same url with two tags: http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/aclu/ http://www.rmtracking.com/blog/tag/rfid/ Should I activate the canonical URL setting in Wordpress again. If not, how can I fix this? Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Regards, Brad
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0