Canonical Tag when using Ajax and PhantomJS
-
Hello,
We have a site that is built using an AJAX application. We include the meta fragment tag in order to get a rendered page from PhantomJS. The URL that is rendered to google from PhantomJS then is www.oursite.com/?escaped_fragment=
In the SERP google of course doesnt include the hashtag in the URL. So my question, with this setup, do i still need a canonical tag and if i do, would the canonical tag be the escaped fragment URL or the regular URL?
Much Appreciated!
-
If you can actually load the regular URL then you should canonical to it (it is best practice to canonical all of your pages to themselves), but if going to that page just redirects to the escaped fragment then you should update how your site build is set up so that you don't have the escaped fragment any more.
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
-
Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Hi! As above, I wrote this article on my medium blog but am now launching my site, UnderstandingJiuJitsu.com. I have the post saved as a draft because I don't want to get pinged by google. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming the UJJ.com post is original when medium was posted first? Thanks and health, Elliott
Technical SEO | | OpenMat0 -
Using canonical for duplicate contents outside of my domain
I have 2 domains for the same company, example.com and example.sg Sometimes we have to post the same content or event on both websites so to protect my website from duplicate content plenty i use canonical tag to point to either .com or .sg depend on the page. Any idea if this is the right decision Thanks
Technical SEO | | MohammadSabbagh0 -
Duplication, pagination and the canonical
Hi all, and thank you in advance for your assistance. We have an issue of paginated pages being seen as duplicates by pro.moz crawlers. The paginated pages do have duplicated by content, but are not duplicates of each other. Rather they pull through a summary of the product descriptions from other landing pages on the site. I was planing to use rel=canonical to deal with them, however I am concerned as the paginated pages are not identical to each other, but do feature their own set of duplicate content! We have a similar issue with pages that are not paginated but feature tabs that alter the URL parameters like so: ?st=BlueWidgets ?st=RedSocks ?st=Offers These are being seen as duplicates of the main URL, and again all feature duplicate content pulled from elsewhere in the site, but are not duplicates of each other. Would a canonical tag be suitable here? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | .egg0 -
Duplicate pages in Google index despite canonical tag and URL Parameter in GWMT
Good morning Moz... This is a weird one. It seems to be a "bug" with Google, honest... We migrated our site www.three-clearance.co.uk to a Drupal platform over the new year. The old site used URL-based tracking for heat map purposes, so for instance www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html ..could be reached via www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=menu or www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=sidebar and so on. GWMT was told of the ref parameter and the canonical meta tag used to indicate our preference. As expected we encountered no duplicate content issues and everything was good. This is the chain of events: Site migrated to new platform following best practice, as far as I can attest to. Only known issue was that the verification for both google analytics (meta tag) and GWMT (HTML file) didn't transfer as expected so between relaunch on the 22nd Dec and the fix on 2nd Jan we have no GA data, and presumably there was a period where GWMT became unverified. URL structure and URIs were maintained 100% (which may be a problem, now) Yesterday I discovered 200-ish 'duplicate meta titles' and 'duplicate meta descriptions' in GWMT. Uh oh, thought I. Expand the report out and the duplicates are in fact ?ref= versions of the same root URL. Double uh oh, thought I. Run, not walk, to google and do some Fu: http://is.gd/yJ3U24 (9 versions of the same page, in the index, the only variation being the ?ref= URI) Checked BING and it has indexed each root URL once, as it should. Situation now: Site no longer uses ?ref= parameter, although of course there still exists some external backlinks that use it. This was intentional and happened when we migrated. I 'reset' the URL parameter in GWMT yesterday, given that there's no "delete" option. The "URLs monitored" count went from 900 to 0, but today is at over 1,000 (another wtf moment) I also resubmitted the XML sitemap and fetched 5 'hub' pages as Google, including the homepage and HTML site-map page. The ?ref= URls in the index have the disadvantage of actually working, given that we transferred the URL structure and of course the webserver just ignores the nonsense arguments and serves the page. So I assume Google assumes the pages still exist, and won't drop them from the index but will instead apply a dupe content penalty. Or maybe call us a spam farm. Who knows. Options that occurred to me (other than maybe making our canonical tags bold or locating a Google bug submission form 😄 ) include A) robots.txt-ing .?ref=. but to me this says "you can't see these pages", not "these pages don't exist", so isn't correct B) Hand-removing the URLs from the index through a page removal request per indexed URL C) Apply 301 to each indexed URL (hello BING dirty sitemap penalty) D) Post on SEOMoz because I genuinely can't understand this. Even if the gap in verification caused GWMT to forget that we had set ?ref= as a URL parameter, the parameter was no longer in use because the verification only went missing when we relaunched the site without this tracking. Google is seemingly 100% ignoring our canonical tags as well as the GWMT URL setting - I have no idea why and can't think of the best way to correct the situation. Do you? 🙂 Edited To Add: As of this morning the "edit/reset" buttons have disappeared from GWMT URL Parameters page, along with the option to add a new one. There's no messages explaining why and of course the Google help page doesn't mention disappearing buttons (it doesn't even explain what 'reset' does, or why there's no 'remove' option).
Technical SEO | | Tinhat0 -
Canonical and 301
Hi We have recently restructured our site and 301 redirected some pages. Unfortunately the new page which we 301 to, still had the canonical tags pointing to the old pages. Would this cause google not to index the new pages....?????
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
How do I properly use the canonical tag to avoid negative effect from having identical content on 2 url’s?
To illustrate… I have same website uploaded at 2 locations (url’s). Only the domain extensions are different. www.myexample.com
Technical SEO | | swiftseo
www.myexample.org The benefit is that I may run some promos on one location and not the other to help in product surveys/testing. The website content is 98% identical and I understand this content duplication may cause SEO problems. The domain I wish to use for rankings etc is www.myexample.com 1) How do I go about avoiding seo problem? Do I need to place the canonical tag at www.myexample.org ie 2) Do I also place the exact same tag at the .com location or not necessary there? Is there an alternative or more effective option to resolving the problem?0 -
Duplicate content and tags
Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?
Technical SEO | | ngw0 -
Should I use a "-", ":", or "|" in the title tag?
Out of habit, I've always put a "-" or dash to separate items in the title tag. However, I've noticed that more and more sites are using either a ":" or "|" in the title. Is there one that is better to use than the other?
Technical SEO | | beeneeb0