Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
-
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links.
Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag.
-
However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up?
-
I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up...
Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
-
-
What I do when I want to get an idea of how frequently Google crawls a page is I look at when it was last crawled. If the cached date was a long time ago, Google probably doesn't crawl it that often. If it was recently cached, it could mean a more frequent crawl—but it also might be that I just caught it at the right time. So I look at a few similar pages to see if they agree.
(To see when a page was cached, do a search on the URL of the page in question—just put the URL right in the search box. In the results, look next to the green URL in the result which is the page you searched for and there is a little green triangle. Click that, and you will see "cached." Choose that, and it will bring up the version of the page that Google has cached, along with the date it was cached.)
Don't worry too much. Even without your fixes, Google will figure out the situation on its own and start showing a preferred URL anyway. But yes, it is generally a good choice to show yourself in the best light and follow best practices to make things as easy as possible for Google.
-
There is no specific, hard set, predefined "time" between crawls that applies to all sites.
It varies, from site to site.
It varies from page to page.
It is based on Popularity.
If your page/site is not popular - then it will take longer till it is crawled again.
-
Thanks for a response.
What's a 'normal' wait time -- 2 days? 7 days? 14 days? How do I know when to try again?
-
If you've changed your canonical tag, but Google hasn't updated its index, there's nothing more you can do till you see what effect it has. Wait a few days and post again with your results. If something's out of order, at least we have another data set to compare it to.
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 Issue On AMP
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari
I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?0 -
Copied Content - Define Canonical
Hello, The Story I am working on a news organization. Our website is the https://www.neakriti.gr My question regards copied content with source references. Sometimes a small portion of our content is based on some third article that is posted on some site (that is about 1% of our content). We always put "source" reference if that is the case. This is inevitable as "news" is something that sometimes has sources on other news sites, especially if there is something you cannot verify or don't have immediate sources, and therefore you need to state that "according to this source, something has happened". Here is one article of ours that has a source from another site: https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1503363/nekros-vrethike-o-agnooumenos-arhimandritis-stin-lakonia/ if you open the above article you will see we have a link to the equivalent article of the original source site http://lakonikos.gr/epikairothta/item/133664-nekros-entopistike-o-arximandritis-p-andreas-bolovinos-synexis-enimerosi Now here is my question. I have read in other MOZ forum articles that a "canonical" approach solves this issue... How can we be legit when it comes to duplicate content in the eyes of search engines? Should we use some kind of canonical link to the source site? Should the "canonical" be inside the link in some way? Should it be on our section? Our site has AMP equivalent pages (if you add the /amp keyword at the end of the article URL). Our AMP pages have canonical to our original article. So if we have a "canonical" approach how would the AMP be effected as well? Also by applying a possible canonical solution to the source URL, does that "canonical" effect our article as not being shown in search results, thus passing all indexing to the canonical site? (I know that canonical indicates what URL is to be indexed). Additionally, does such a canonical indication make us legit in such a case in the eyes of search engines? (i.e. it eliminates any possible article duplication for original content in the eyes of search engines?). Or simply put, having a simple link to the original article (as we have it now) is enough for the search engines to understand that we have reference to original article URL? How would we approach this problem in our site based on its current structure?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioannisanif0 -
Interesting Cross Domain Canonical Quirk...
We recently ran cross domain canonicals for 2 of our websites. What's interesting is that when I do a search for ""site:domain1.com "product name"" the Title in the SERPs uses the Domain Name from the site the page has been canonicaled to. So the title for Domain1 (for the search term above) looks like this: Product Name | Keywords | Domain 2 Interesting quirk. Ha anyone else seen this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
Is dynamic pages helps in E commerce SEO?
Whats are the best way to create dynamic pages in eCommerce website having static urls? Or what are other ways to increase/create more pages in websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Help with 50 Plus Penalty, No Manual Action Reported
We have a client who had been ranking in Google’s top ten organic results for 2 of his major keywords last year. Currently Bing and Yahoo ranks his site #1 for both of these terms; the ranking pages that are appearing were specifically targeted with these words. As of now, the client appears to have a 50 plus penalty for these two keywords. Appearing #76 for one term and # 60 for the other. We were thinking of submitting a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster tools, but discovered that you aren’t allowed to do that unless a Manual Action has appeared, which in this case has not. The only problem we’ve had with the site from an SEO standpoint is that we recently discovered a website that had copied some of the product descriptions verbatim. The client contacted the site owner who took it down immediately (about a month ago), but we still have not seen any improvement in rankings for these keywords. Does anyone have any ideas on how to communicate this Google and get the suspected penalty lifted if a reconsideration request is apparently not available?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roundabout0 -
How can I improve my rankings in Google with help of seomoz
Hey guys, I have joined seomoz today and set up campaigns for my sites. I got reports about keyword rankings, errors, notices etc. But I am still confused about how to use seomoz in order to improve my rankings. My point is does seomoz provides any services for improving position in google or simply seomoz provides only reporting? These reports are good but my ultimate goal to join seomoz is to improve my rankings for my each website and each post. Please help. BJ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | intmktcom0 -
Please help on this penalized site!
OK, this is slowly frying my brain and would like some clarification from someone in the know, we have posted multiple reconsideration requests the regular "site violates googles quality guidelines" .."look for unnatural links etc" email back in March 2012, I came aboard the business in August 2012 to overcome bad SEO companies work. So far i have filled several disavow requests by domain and cleared over 90% of our backlink profile which where all directory, multiple forum spam links etc from WMT, OSE and Ahrefs and compiled this to the disavow tool, as well as sending a google docs shared file in our reconsideration request of all the links we have been able to remove and the disavow tool, since most where built in 2009/2010 a lot where impossible to remove. We managed to shift about 12 - 15% of our backlink profile by working very very hard too remove them. The only links that where left where quality links and forum posts created by genuine users and relevant non spam links As well as this we now have a high quality link profile which has also counteracted a lot of the bad "seo" work done by these previous companies, i have explained this fully in our reconsideration request as well as a massive apology on behalf of the work those companies did, and we are STILL getting generic "site violates" messages, so far we have spent in excess of 150 hours to get this penalty removed and so far Google hasn't even batted an eyelid. We have worked SO hard to combat this issue it almost feels almost very personal, if Google read the reconsideration request they would see how much work we have done too remove this issue. If anyone can give any updates or help on anything we have missed i would appreciate it, i feel like we have covered every base!! Chris www.palicomp.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | palicomp0 -
Real impact of canonical links?
I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites. SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this! Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP. I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this? I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority. Here are 2 examples of what I mean: 1) Category pages www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared. www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10 www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20 The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different. Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads: 2) Product pages Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them. You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page. Example: Search link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages? Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0