Dealing with Canonical tag in volusion
-
Hi
We have an ecommerce site where we have some returns/scratch /dented products identical to the original one. The onpage content of the damaged/original is pretty much identical with the damaged just having a describing the damage. I had wanted to make a canonical tag on the damaged product to the original so it would not be a problem of duplicate content but as it is a volusion site we dont have that option - it only canonicalizes back to itself!
Any ideas what else I can do - cant really change the content much and I dont really want to deindex it so people find it?
Thanks!
-
If you canonicalize the damaged product back to the original product, the damaged one won't be findable in search anyway, same as if you had deindexed it. In either case, people could still find it on your website.
And are you sure you cannot change the canonical? This support page seems to imply that you can.
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
-
Are there any downsides to using a canonical tag temporarily?
I'm working on redesigning our website. One of the content types has a main archive page (/success-stories) containing all of the success stories (written by graduates of our program). Because we plan to have success stories for other people (non-graduates), I'm using category hierarchies (/success-stories/graduates and success-stories/nonprofits, for example). It will go one level deeper to organize graduates by graduation year (/success-stories/graduates/%year%). I think this will work out well. However, we won't have non-graduate success stories for a little while, probably at least a few weeks, which means that /success-stories and /.../graduates indices will contain the same content for a while. So my question is this: Will it hurt to use a canonical tag that points to /success-stories/graduates as the authority until the main archive page contains more than just graduates? Or would it be better to use a 302 redirect from /success-stories to /.../graduates until more diverse content is added?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bcaples0 -
Title tag and user intent
I am just wondering if I create a page that present different e-bike kits and my title tag tag is "the best e-bike kits in 2019", will I rank on "e-bike kits" and "best e-bike kits" or on just "best e-bike kits" ? It seems that user intent can be tricky and sometimes a title tag can make all the difference. How about if I write "Explore Burgundy on a bike tour "to rank on "Burgundy bike tour", will I rank or is the user intent different when I write explore (meaning I am looking for something self guided instead of guided) Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
X Default on hreflang tags
Hi guys, I would like to clarify something about hreflang markups and most importantly, x-default. Sample URLs:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools
http://www.example.com/au/collection/dresses (Australia)
http://www.example.com/us/collection/dresses (United States)
http://www.example.com/uk/collection/dresses (United Kingdom) Sample Markups: Questions:
1. Can I use my AU page as x default? I noticed that some x default are US. Note that my biggest market is AU though.
2. If I indeed use AU page as x default, and the user is searching from China, does it mean that Google will return my AU page?
3. Can you spot any issues with these markups I made? Anything that I need to correct. Keen to hear from you! Cheers,
Chris0 -
Alt Tags
Hi We have lots of alt tags missing, I know they'e recommended by Google, so moving forward we will ensure we add them to product images, but should we go back and update the ones we have missing? How important is it for SEO? Has anyone tested this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Help Dealing with Sustained Negative SEO Attack
Hello, I am hoping that someone is able to help with a problem that is destroying both my business and my health. We are an ecommerce site who have been trading since 2004 and who have always had strong rankings in Google. Unfortunately, over the past couple of months, these have significantly decreased (I would estimate around 40% drop in organic traffic). We have not had a manual penalty and still have decent rankings for a lot of competitive keywords, so we think it is more likely to be an algorithmic penalty.The most likely culprit is due to a huge scale negative SEO attack that has been going on for around 18 months. Last September, we suffered a major drop in rankings as a result of the 302 hijack scheme, but after submitting a disavow file (of around 500 domains) on 12th November, we recovered on 26th November (although we now don't know whether this was due to disavow file or the Phantom III update on 19th November).After suffering another major drop at the end of June, we submitted a disavow file of 1100 domains (this the scale of the problem!). This tempoarily halted the slide, however it is getting worse again. I have attached a file from Majestic which shows the increase in the backlinks (however we are not building these).We are at a loss and desperately need help. We have contacting all the sites to try and get links removed but they are happening faster than we can contact them. We have also done a full technical audit and added around 50,000 words of unique, handwritten content, as well as continuing to work through all technical fixes and improvements.At the moment, the only thing we can think of doing is submitting a weekly disavow for all the new spammy domains that come up. The questions I have are: Is there anything we can do to stop the attack? Is this increase in backlinks likely to be the culprit for the drops (both the big drops and the subsequent weekly 10% drop)? If so, would weekly disavows solve the problem? Is this likely to take months (years?) to recover from or can it be done quicker? Can you give me any ray of light to help me sleep at night? 😞 Really appreciate any and all help. I wouldn't wish ths on anyone.Thanks,Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonukss0 -
Duplicate Title tags even with rel=canonical
Hello, We were having duplicate content in our blog (a replica of each post automatically was done by the CMS), until we recently implemented a rel=canonical tag to all the duplicate posts (some 5 weeks ago). So far, no duplicate content were been found, but we are still getting duplicate title tags, though the rel=canonical is present. Any idea why is this the case and what can we do to solve it? Thanks in advance for your help. Tej Luchmun
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | luxresorts0 -
Rel Canonical attribute order
So the position of the attribute effect the rel canonical tags' ability to function? is the way I see it across multiple documents and websites. Having a discussion with someone in the office and there is a website with it set up as: Will that cause any problems? The website is inquestion still has both pages indexed within Google using the SITE:domain.com/product as well as SITE:domain.com/category/product
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasondexter0 -
Canonical URLs and Sitemaps
We are using canonical link tags for product pages in a scenario where the URLs on the site contain category names, and the canonical URL points to a URL which does not contain the category names. So, the product page on the site is like www.example.com/clothes/skirts/skater-skirt-12345, and also like www.example.com/sale/clearance/skater-skirt-12345 in another category. And on both of these pages, the canonical link tag references a 3rd URL like www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. This 3rd URL, used in the canonical link tag is a valid page, and displays the same content as the other two versions, but there are no actual links to this generic version anywhere on the site (nor external). Questions: 1. Does the generic URL referenced in the canonical link also need to be included as on-page links somewhere in the crawled navigation of the site, or is it okay to be just a valid URL not linked anywhere except for the canonical tags? 2. In our sitemap, is it okay to reference the non-canonical URLs, or does the sitemap have to reference only the canonical URL? In our case, the sitemap points to yet a 3rd variation of the URL, like www.example.com/product.jsp?productID=12345. This page retrieves the same content as the others, and includes a canonical link tag back to www.example.com/skater-skirt-12345. Is this a valid approach, or should we revise the sitemap to point to either the category-specific links or the canonical links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 379seo0