Canonical URL on search result pages
-
Hi there,
Our company sells educational videos to Nurses via subscription.
I've been looking at their video search results page:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpdWhen you click on a category, the URL appears like this:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=MedicationsWould this be an instance where i'd use the canonical tag to redirect each search results page?
Bearing in mind the /cpd page is under /Nursing cpd, and that /Nursing cpd is our best performing page in search engines, would it be better to refer it to the 'Nursing CPD' rather than 'CPD' page?
Any advice is very welcome,
Thanks,
John -
Thanks David,
Thanks for your response, very helpful
I agree, there is a lot of room for improvement. Its written on an old .aspx CMS platform and i'm having a real nightmare trying to get used to it.. It ain't no Wordpress - that much is clear!
Page titles + descriptions were the first things I was going to get started on, I've just been defining the core keywords before I get going!
Cheers
-
Hi John,
Just having a quick look at the site I can see a lot of room for improvement!
These category pages are being indexed correctly and ranking well for specific searches (eg. Correctional Services Nursing cpd) so I wouldn't recommend using canonical tags the way you are suggesting. All pages of your site should have a canonical tag pointing to themselves, but I wouldn't be using them to pass authority to other pages in this case.
The URL structure is a bit of a mess so it would be good if you could improve it from:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=9&name=Acute+Surgical+Nursing
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd?view=category&cat=6&name=Medications
To something like:
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/acute-surgical-nursing/
http://www.nursesfornurses.com.au/cpd/medications/You should also pay some attention to the duplicate Page Titles and Meta Descriptions throughout the site
Cheers,
David
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
-
Spammy page with canonical reference to my website
A potentially spammy website http://www.rofof.com/ has included a rel canonical tag pointing to my website. They've included the tag on thousands of pages on their website. Furthermore http://www.rofof.com/ appears to have backlinks from thousands of other low-value domains For example www.kazamiza.com/vb/kazamiza242122/, along with thousands of other pages on thousands of other domains all link to pages on rofof.com, and the pages they link to on rofof.com are all canonicalized to a page on my site. If Google does respect the canonical tag on rofof.com and treats it as part of my website then the thousands of spammy links that point to rofof.com could be considered as pointing to my website. I'm trying to contact the owner of www.rofof.com hoping to have the canonical tag removed from their website. In the meantime, I've disavowed the www.rofof.com, the site that has canonical tag. Will that have any effect though? Will disavow eliminate the effect of a rel canonical tag on the disavowed domain or does it only affect links on the disavowed website? If it only affects links then should I attempt to disavow all the pages that link to rofof.com? Thanks for reading. I really appreciate any insight you folks can offer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brucepomeroy2 -
Is there a way to rel = canonical only part of a page?
Hi guys: I'm doing SEO for a boat accessories store, and for instance they have marine AC systems, many of them, and while the part number, number of BTUs, voltage, and accessories change on some models, the description stays exactly the same across the board on many of them...people often search on Google by model number, and I worry that if I put rel = canonical, then the result for that specific model they're looking for won't come up, just the one that everything is being redirected to. (and people do this much more than entering a site nowadays and searching by product model, it's easier). Excuse my ignorance on this stuff, I'm good with link building and content creation, but the behind-the-scenes aspects... not so much: Can I "rel=canonical" only part of the page of the repeat models (the long description)? so people can still search by model number, and reach the model they are looking for? Am I misunderstanding something here about rel=canonical (Interesting thing, I rank very high for these pages with tons of repeat descriptions, number one in many places... but wonder if google attributes a sort of "across the site" penalty for the repeated content... but wouldn't ranking number 1 for these pages mean nothing's wrong?. Thanks)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidCiti1 -
Case Sensitive URLs, Duplicate Content & Link Rel Canonical
I have a site where URLs are case sensitive. In some cases the lowercase URL is being indexed and in others the mixed case URL is being indexed. This is leading to duplicate content issues on the site. The site is using link rel canonical to specify a preferred URL in some cases however there is no consistency whether the URLs are lowercase or mixed case. On some pages the link rel canonical tag points to the lowercase URL, on others it points to the mixed case URL. Ideally I'd like to update all link rel canonical tags and internal links throughout the site to use the lowercase URL however I'm apprehensive! My question is as follows: If I where to specify the lowercase URL across the site in addition to updating internal links to use lowercase URLs, could this have a negative impact where the mixed case URL is the one currently indexed? Hope this makes sense! Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | allianzireland0 -
Search traffic decline after redesign and new URL
Howdy Mozzers I’ve been a Moz fan since 2005, and been doing SEO since. This is my first major question to the community! I just started working for a new company in-house, and we’ve uncovered a serious problem. This is a bit of a long one, so I’m hoping you’ll stick it out with me! ***Since the images aren't working, here's a link to the google doc with images. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I-iLDjBXI4d59Kl3uRMwLvpihWWKF3bQFTTNRb1R3ZM/edit?usp=sharing Background The site has gone through a few changes in the past few years. Drupal 5 and 6 hosted at bcbusinessonline.ca and now on Drupal 7 hosted at bcbusiness.ca. The redesigned responsive design site launched on January 9th, 2013. This includes changing the structure of the URL’s, such as categories, tags, and articles. We submitted a change of address through GWT shortly after the change. Problem Organic site traffic is down 50% over the last three months. Below, Google analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools shows the decline. *They used the same UA number for Google analytics, so that’s why the data is continuous Organic traffic to the site. January 2011 - Dips in January are because of the business crowd on holidays. Google Webmaster Tools data exported for bcbusiness.ca starting as far back as I could get. Redirects During the switch, the site went from bcbusinessonline.ca to bcbusiness.ca. They were implemented as 302’s on January 9th, 2013 to test, then on January 15th, they were all made 301’s. Here is how they were set up: Original: http://www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/bcb/bc-blogs/conference/2010/10/07/11-phrases-never-use-your-resume --301-- http://www.bcbusiness.ca/careers/11-phrases-never-to-use-on-your-resume Canonical issue On bcbusiness.ca, there are article pages (example) that are paginated. All of the page 2 to page N were set to the first page of the article. We addressed this issue by removing the canonical tag completely from the site on April 16th, 2013. Then, by walking through the Ayima Pagination Guide we decided for immediate and least work choice was to noindex, follow all the pages that simply list articles (example). Google Algorithm Changes (Penguin or Panda) According to SEOmoz Google Algorithm Changes there is no releases that could have impacted our site at the February 20th ballpark. However - Sitemap We have a sitemap submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, and currently have 4,229 pages indexed of 4,312 submitted. But there are a few pages we looked at that there is an inconsistency between what GWT is reporting and what a “site:” search reports. Why would the submit to index button be showing, if it’s in the index? That page is in the sitemap. Updated: 2012-11-28T22:08Z Change Frequency: Yearly Priority: 0.5 *GWT Index Stats from bcbusiness.ca What we looked at so far The redirects are all currently 301’s GWT is reporting good DNS, Server Connectivity, and Robots.txt Fetch We don’t have noindex or nofollow on pages where we haven’t intended them to be. Robots.txt isn’t blocking GoogleBot, or any pages we want to rank. We have added nofollow to all ‘Promoted Content’ or paid advertising / advertorials We had TextLinkAds on our site at one point but I removed them once I satarted working here (April 1). Sitemaps were linking to the old URL, but now updated (April)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Canada_wide_media1 -
Why have I disappeared from 1st page to outside top 100 results?
I have been #2 in Google for "plenty more fish" for about 8 years and have now disappeared. I've been told that I have no manual spam action against my domain www.plentymorefish.net. Can anyone suggest why I have disappeared and how I might rectify this? My guess is something to do with the Panda update Sept 27th - EMD (Exact Match Domain), although I don't understand why Google have left a competitors site #1 as this also has exact match domain. Maybe they've just picked one exact match domain to display and have not chosen mine as the .com has a better overall SEO score. Appreciate any assitance. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | benners0 -
Canonical URL Question
Hi Everyone I like to run this question by the community and get a second opinion on best practices for an issue that I ran into. I got two pages, Page A is the original page and Page B is the page with duplicate content. We already added** ="Page A**" />** to the duplicate content (Page B).** **Here is my question, since Page B is duplicate content and there is a link rel="canonical" added to it, would you put in the time to add meta tags and optimize the title of the page? Thanks in advance for all your help.**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRTBA0 -
Canonical Tags & Search Bots
Does anyone know for sure if search engine bots still crawl links on a page whose canonical tags are set to a different page? So in short, would it be similar to a no-index follow? Thanks! -Margarita
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840