What canonical makes sense in this particular situation?
-
Hi Mozzers,
I am running into a situation where I am not sure what would be the canonical best practice.
I am working on an e-commerce site (magento)
Situation 1 :
site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/
Situation 2:
if site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ wouldn't it make sense to have site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ (situation1) canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ instead of site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ ? and if I am right would it hurt to have both situations 1 and 2 combined?
Thanks Guys!
-
Thank you Guys!
-
If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.
www.site.com = canonical
the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'
-
Hi,
You should avoid URL canonicalization chains just like you avoid redirect chains. If URL1, URL2, URL3 contain substantially similar or identical content and if you choose URL1 to be the canonical/preferred one then here is what you should ideally be doing:
URL 2 --> Canonicalized to URL1
URL 3 --> Canonicalized to URL1 and not to URL2
In this case, only URL1 will be in Google's index. Here you go for more:
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions
Check out point 9.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
-
Anything make sense if it make sense.
The only rule is what make sense from a duplicate content perspective. And you are not limited to rules based on category tree sub levels.
Just think about the content of each category (or family/group of categories) and what make sense to have in google index. What should go in google index is the target of the canonicalization, what doesn't matter to have in the index (because duplicate, because of ridiculous potential traffic, etc...) should have the meta canonical tag pointing to the canonical url. That's all.
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
-
Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical
Hi all, A number of our pages have dropped out of search rankings. It seems they are being marked as "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical" However, the page Google is choosing as the canonical is totally different - different headings, titles, metadata, content on the page. We are completely mystified as to why this is happening. If anyone can shed any light, it would be hugely appreciated! Example URL is this one:
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/london Which Google seems to think is a duplicate of this: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/solicitor/london0 -
Shopify Canonicals for Tagged Filters
I've been researching this topic endlessly and thought I had arrived at a solution but Screaming Frog indicates my solution was not successful. Problem: I used tags to filter my collections pages. The result, I discovered, was the creation of dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds, of additional collection URLs for each possible permutation of tag filters. I would like to make the collection page URL, with no tag filters, the canonical. Proposed Solution: I found the following code described somewhere as the solution: {% if template contains 'collection' and current_tags %} {% else %} {% endif %} However, I crawled my site with Screaming Frog and found that the canonical link element is still listed as the URL with the tags included. The crawler does recognizes the "noindex" instruction. Any ideas on what the best move is here?
Technical SEO | | vgusvg0 -
Making a site mobile friendly
Hey Mozzers, Im having a go at making our site mobile friendly without enlisting the help of developers and incorporating additional costs. I am ok with most of it as its just CSS work bar the odd occasion when i need to reposition some elements within the code. However, i have found myself wanting to use display:none {} on many elements that are just not practical on a mobile site. Some pages may have to hide substantial content. Would this be considered an issue or will google just see it as me hiding impractical elements for a different sized screen. I have googled this question for the past hour and there is a whole bunch of conflicting advice. As always, Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Cross domain canonical issue
Hello fella SEOs! I have a very intriguing question concerning different TLDs across the same domain. For eg: www.mainwebsite.com, www.mainwebsite.eu, www.mainwebsite.au, www.mainwebsite.co.uk etc... Now, assuming that all these websites are similar in terms of content, will our lovely friend Google consider all these TLDs as only one and unique domain or will this cause a duplicate content problem? If yes, then how should I fix it? Thnx for your precious help guys!
Technical SEO | | SEObandits1 -
Canonical needed after no index
Hi do you need to point canonical from a subpage to main page if you have already marked a no index on the subpage, like when google is not indexing it so do we need canonicals now as is it passing any juice?
Technical SEO | | razasaeed0 -
Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?
Hi Folks, We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's. The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites. After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600. Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake. I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found. After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days. I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions: Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post? What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
Do I have a canonical problem?
Does this site www.davidclick.com have a canonical problem because the home page can be requested via 3 different urls http://www.davidclick.com/
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://davidclick.com/
http://www.davidclick.com/index.htm but I'm confused in terms of applying a fix for example all advice here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#1 says i need to identify the duplicate files and add So my question is please if I do have a canonical problem how can i fix it when I only have one file for my home page, there are no duplicates 😞 Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Wordpress Canonical Problem
I'm using wordpress for my website but m unable to implement Canonical tag property for pages under the same category, Like for matt's blog: The Tag is same .. for all pages under that category: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ & http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/2/ is it some hack or some plugin ? please suggest! thanks
Technical SEO | | AnkitRawat0