Canonical URL availability
-
Hi
We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL.
For instance:
- Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html
- White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html
- White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html
Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL:
But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?
-
Thanks Dirk for your great in-depth response!
I will now check with developers what the estimated effort would be. Making the canonical URL available will let me sleep better at night before releasing the new site version.
I think the risk shouldn't be huge if we cannot do this and will not waste too many ressources on this (unless, of course, we see a negative impact, which I will then report here;)Best,
Phil -
With a 301 you communicate that the requested resource is no longer available (The requested resource has been assigned a new permanent URI and any future references to this resource SHOULD use one of the returned URIs- source: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html)
If you look at the definition of a canonical url - it indicates the preferred URL to use, so that the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Google attempts to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)
So basically what you are telling to Google:
On your site you ask Google not to index site.com/A.htm - but rather to index url site.com/B.htm
On the url site.com/B.htm you put a 301 to site.com/C.htm - in other words force Google to index C.htm rather than B.htm (the 301 indicates that the page has permanently moved to a new location - so is no longer available on B.htm)So in fact - you ask Google not to index A.htm but C.htm instead. Rather than doing this in a complicated 2step process using both canonical & redirect it would be simpler & make more sense to directly put a canonical url on A.htm with C.htm as canonical.
In your case you could create www.site.com/iphone but if it's identical to www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html I don't think you will gain a lot (especially if it requires a lot of development)
rgds,
Dirk
-
Thank you Dirk!
I did look at the article you pointed out, but could not initially find that information:
"Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)"However, for me this is not 100% conclusive. The page does exist, in a way, but it's redirected. I know that to be on the safe side, we should better make it available. But as it would mean a lot of additional programming effort, I am trying to find out if it really is necessary. Thats' why I was hoping someone already has some experience with this...
-
Normally a canonical url should be physically available - see also: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
With a canonical you indicate the Search engines which page you want to have listed in the SERP's. A page which is 301'd to another page will never get listed in the results.
In your case - it's probably better to use the url where your are redirecting to as canonical - or to create a page www.site.com/iphone that is not redirected
rgds,
Dirk
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
-
Canonical code set up correctly?
Please let me know if this makes sense. I have a very limited knowledge of technical SEO but I am almost positive that my web developer did something wrong. I have a wordpress blog and he did add canonical code to some of the pages. However he directs the site to the same URL! Does this mean that the canonical code is setup incorrectly and actually harming my SEO performance. Also if I have one webpage with just the first paragraph of a blog post I wrote and a completely seperate page for the blog post itself, could this be considered duplicate content? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DR700950 -
Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch
Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig860 -
Can you Canonical to a URL in a different folder under the same domain?
I want to know if it's possible to add a canonical tag to a URL that points to a URL under a different folder. Content is just about the same. Here's an example (fake urls and product, but structure and parameters are similar to my client's website): domain.com/toy-ducks-results.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis domain.com/toy-ducks-details.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis&style=Sparkly Let's say that my purple Elvis ducks are really popular. Is there any harm in putting a rel=canonical on the Sparkly Elvis ducks page to the purple Elvis ducks page? Even though they are two different folders? /toy-ducks-results and /toy-ducks-details So, in effect, the preferred folder is /toy-ducks-results Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE30 -
Overly-Dynamic URL
Hi, We have over 5000 pages showing under Overly-Dynamic URL error Our ecommerce site uses Ajax and we have several different filters like, Size, Color, Brand and we therefor have many different urls like, http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Pumps.html?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y http://www.dellamoda.com/Designer-Accessories.html?sort=title&use_selected_filter=Y&view=all http://www.dellamoda.com/designer-handbags.html?use_selected_filter=Y&option=manufacturer%3A&page3 Could we use the robots.txt file to disallow these from showing as duplicate content? and do we need to put the whole url in there? like: Disallow: /*?sort=price&sort_direction=1&use_selected_filter=Y if not how far into the url should be disallowed? So far we have added the following to our robots,txt Disallow: /?sort=title Disallow: /?use_selected_filter=Y Disallow: /?sort=price Disallow: /?clearall=Y Just not sure if they are correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Kami
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dellamoda2 -
Renaming a URL
Hi, If we rename a URL (below) http://www.opentext.com/2/global/company/company-ecm-positioning.htm
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pstables
to http://www.opentext.com/2/global/products/enterprise-content-management.htm (or something similar) Would search engines recognize that as a new page altogether? I know they would need to reindex it accordingly, so in theory it is kind of a "new" page. But the reason for doing this is to maintain the page's metrics (inbound links, authority, social activity, etc) instead of creating a new page from scratch. The page has been indexed highly in the past, so we want to keep it active but optimize it better and redirect other internal content (that's being phased out) to it to juice it up even more. Thanks in advance!
Greg0 -
Changing my url name? Should I do it?
Hi, I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE]. Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this. Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url? Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc.. Any ideas on this? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Url with hypen or.co?
Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)? Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joechicago0