Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
-
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
-
I would just title them according to their view type. Try to put your most informative words as close to the front as possible so that it's easy to read in browser tabs, for example: Red Widgets, All Widgets, <$25 Widgets... etc. Meta description could probably be a repeat of the title tag. Make the title as UX friendly as possible.
-
- What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
What are your thoughts on title tag and meta description on these pages? The only thing that changes on these pages is how the item is displayed. Should I change the title tag and meta description even though they should never be the organic landing page?
-
Yes, I would not put them in the sitemap. Main goal of a sitemap is to make it easier for bots to discover the different pages of the site. The pages that have a canonical url pointing to another page don't really need this, as you don't want the search engines to index them anyway.
-
Since my preference is always to have people land on the page with thumbnails that is what I was thinking but wanted to double check. Thank you.
-
Based on how you're describing it, I'd leave them out of the sitemap.
-
These pages will be almost identical. They are category pages for ecommerce and the only difference is it will display all items and there will be no thumbnails. It sounds like you are saying not to put them in the sitemap in this instance?
-
They are category pages for an ecommerce site. Currently we list the items 25 to a page with a thumbnail. The second view will be all of the items in a basic list view with no thumbnails. We have some categories with several hundred items and our users have requested a way to see them all on one page.
-
Hi,
Agree with the arguments of Ryan on the whether or not to put the canonical.
However, if you decide that these pages are almost identical, and that you will use a canonical, it has no use to put all the variations of these pages in the sitemap. However, you should add the canonical version to the sitemap.
It's not a big problem if these pages are in the sitemap, you'll just notice it webmaster tools a low % of indexed pages for this sitemap.
rgds,
Dirk
-
Are the different views going to be substantially different pages or a reordering of products seen throughout each view? If the latter is the case I wouldn't use rel="canonical" for each view. If the pages are substantially different, like one is just displaying widgets, while the other is displaying widget maintenance tools, the having each of those pages as categorical sections to your store is worth it and worth being in the sitemap.
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 tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
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 -
"Null" appearing as top keyword in "Content Keywords" under Google index in Google Search Console
Hi, "Null" is appearing as top keyword in Google search console > Google Index > Content Keywords for our site http://goo.gl/cKaQ4K . We do not use "null" as keyword on site. We are not able to find why Google is treating "null" as a keyword for our site. Is anyone facing such issue. Thanks & Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
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 -
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)? We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kchandler0 -
Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain. We have set up different rel="alternative codes like: The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com? For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to: Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlliedComputer
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0
