Can I leave off HTTP/HTTPS in a canonical tag?
-
We are working on moving our site to HTTPS and I was asked by my dev team if it is required to declare HTTP or HTTPS in the canonical tag? I know that relative URL's are acceptable but cannot find anything about HTTP/HTTPS.
Example of what they would like to do
Has anyone done this?
Any reason to not leave off the protocol?
-
Very good to hear, thanks Shawn! The goal is to use absolute canonicals, but for a period of time, we may have to use protocol relative. The redirects in place should avoid any duplicate content issues, which seems to be the big landmine.
-
That's good to know. Thanks for the update Shawn.
Since the initial discussion took place several Google reps. have publicly stated that there is no PageRank loss between redirects and rel ="canonical" tags. This seems to substantiate their claim.
The biggest issue with these is when giving conflicting instructions to user agents, such as a redirect to a page that rel canonicals back to the URL from which it was redirected, thus closing an infinite loop. For example, if you redirected from HTTP to HTTPS, but then the HTTPS version had a rel ="canonical" tag that was hard-coded to the HTTP version.
The above issue doesn't apply because you're redirecting from HTTP to HTTPs, which shows a relative path rel canonical tag for the HTTPs domain.
-
Now that our entire site is HTTPS, there does not seem to be any negative impact to our URL's by leaving off the HTTP protocol. If there was any traffic lost, it didn't seem significant as our reports did not indicate a decline. One year later, traffic through SEO is higher than before we implemented.
I personally agree with Everett, don't leave things to chance. I did require that the homepage did have HTTPS for the canonical though. I felt massive panic attacks while we were going through the transition. However, if you are unable to convince your developers the importance of using an absolute path for canonical this did not seem to have a negative impact on our site.
I am glad that we didn't have any noticeable impact, but I am also glad that I didn't turn it into a bigger issue within our leadership team. Since we didn't see anything negative, it could've reduced my credibility within the business which would've had made it difficult for larger SEO problems.
BTW, we are still using relative canonical tags today. (except the homepage, that still has HTTPS)
-
Hey Shawn, did using an unspecified HTTP/HTTPS protocol work for you in the canonical and/or HREF-LANG? We are going through a transition to HTTPS as well, and have multiple systems with some URLs that are hard coded. Hoping this solution would work as a short-term fix, while we update these pages to use a new, more dynamic system.
-
Shawn,
My advice would be to canonical everything to the HTTPS version using an absolute path. That would be the best practice. I understand that is not what you're doing and you aren't getting any errors, but site-wide use of rel canonicals is something that can do more harm than good if a search engine misinterprets what you're trying to accomplish.
Either way, good luck and keep us posted.
-
No worries Shawn. I also hope it doesn't cause issues down the line. Everything in me is screaming "Don't do it!"
Best of luck.
-Andy
-
I know, and that's what sucks. It appears to work, but goes against what seems to be best practice and since I cannot find other instances to state one or the other it's hard not to follow their logic.
I just hope it doesn't screw up everything in the end. Thanks for the discussion.
-
Well, if it works (which I didn't think it would!) then I guess that answers one question - and I ran that page through Screaming Frog just to confirm there are no issues and it does indeed canonical back to the https version of the page.
I just can't get out of the mindset that the format looks wrong. I haven't seen other instances of it done that way, and like you, have no documentation to suggest issues that might be caused.
Sorry I can't be of more help.
-Andy
-
Thanks Andy, I posted a reply to the other response that ties into your comment here. On the page I listed above, there are not errors if I use HTTPS and the canonical doesn't declare anything. We have SSL certs, just haven't made the big switch yet.
-
Thanks for the answers, all of which I've passed on to them.
They have attempted this on a page and have not seen any errors or issues as of yet which is problematic for me in the sense of if I cannot show where any issue results by them taking shortcuts, they will not necessarily listen to my feedback.
Here is the URL that they have left off the protocol in the canonical
http://www.alaskaair.com/content/deals/flights/cheapest-flights-to-hawaii.aspx.
I use the Chrome extension Canonical which doesn't give me the icon indicating that I am not viewing the preferred URL. When I use HTTPS and view source it looks the same as it does with HTTP. Sometimes there are parameters in the URL like ?INT=AS_HomePage_-prodID:SEO and even with HTTP missing from the canonical it still seems to work.
Since I cannot find any documentation against doing it this way I am getting strong resistance to declaring HTTP and then going back at some point when it moves to HTTPS and updating. Like I've stated above, they are using this for links and assets on the site since our site moves back and forth between HTTPS and HTTP depending on what the customer is doing and they have found leaving off the protocol it makes their life easier and limits the errors that Andy below mentions.
https://www.alaskaair.com/content/deals/flights/cheapest-flights-to-hawaii.aspx
-
Hi again
To be clear, I think this would populate http://www.domain.com//www.domain.com as the where the canonical should be attributed to.
Hope this makes a bite more sense. Good luck!
-
Example of what they would like to do
That would be a no-no Shawn. If you are running over SSL, then you need to canonical back to the https version of the page. If you don't, you will end up with errors on the page (yellow warning triangle) and trust issues with Google. What they would like to do is canonical to a malformed URL which it could interpret as a file.
Try going to any URL and just entering it as //www.domain.com
-Andy
-
Hi there
According to Google...
Avoid errors**:** use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the
rel="canonical"
link element. However, they then say (under "Prefer HTTPS over HTTP for canonical URLs)...
Google prefers HTTPS pages over equivalent HTTP pages as canonical, except when there are conflicting signals such as the following:
- The HTTPS page has an invalid SSL certificate.
- The HTTPS page contains insecure dependencies.
- The HTTPS page is roboted (and the HTTP page is not).
- The HTTPS page redirects users to or through an HTTP page.
- The HTTPS page has a
rel="canonical"
link to the HTTP page. - The HTTPS page contains a
noindex
robots meta tag
Although our systems prefer HTTPS pages over HTTP pages by default, you can ensure this behavior by taking any of the following actions:
- Add 301 or 302 redirects from the HTTP page to the HTTPS page.
- Add a
rel="canonical"
link from the HTTP page to the HTTPS page. - Implement HSTS.
To prevent Google from incorrectly making the HTTP page canonical, you should avoid the following practices:
- Bad SSL certificates and HTTPS-to-HTTP redirects cause us to prefer HTTP very strongly. Implementing HSTS cannot override this strong preference.
- Including the HTTP page in your sitemap or hreflang entries rather than the HTTPS version.
- Implementing your SSL/TLS certificafe for the wrong host-variant: for example, example.com serving the certificate for www.example.com. The certificate must match your complete site URL, or be a wildcard certificate that can be used for multiple subdomains on a domain.
Since I don't know how your SSL is configured, I can't tell you one way or another, but if you have a https version of your pages, then head that direction. Having a relative protocol won't seem to work here for what you're asking.
Read the above and let me know if that helps! Good luck!
-
I did read that before I asked, it didn't really answer my question. I understand that relative URL's work, but leaving off the protocol declaration isn't relative it just leaves it up to the server to provide whether the site is secure or not.
Since we use multiple systems across our site, there isn't an easy way to implement relative or absolute canonical tags which is why the dev's want to know if they can implement without HTTP/HTTPS. They like to do this with assets on the site and have started to code links in a similar manner. What I can't determine is if this will cause issues.
-
Hi there
According to Google, they want you to either use relative URLs or use absolute URLs. You can read more here.
I recommend reading this so you can see the types of common mistakes they find and how to resolve those.
Good luck!
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
-
Redirecting from https to http - will pass whole link juice to new http website pages?
Hi making permanent 301 redirection from https to http - will pass whole link juice to new http website pages?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Aman_1230 -
Cloaking/Malicious Code
Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Can links from an old site raise DA for other site? Or just unethical?
So this may be an odd question. So a competing company went out of business. Their domain name is now available. So just for research purposes, would you ever or would it be unethical for a person to buy an expired competing domain name, and point it to another site to collect their link juice? The site was only a DA of 10, but not sure if one - its bad to buy a competing companies expired domain - and two - even though in the same industry, this would be bad to point it to another site or create a site from it. Just curious your thoughts.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | asbchris0 -
Can you have too many NOINDEX meta tags?
Hi, Our magento store has a lot of duplicate content issues - after trying various configurations with canonicals, robots, we decided it best and easier to manage to implement Meta NOINDEX tags to the pages that we wish the search engines to ignore. There are about 10000 URL's in our site that can be crawled - 6000 are Meta No Index - and 3000 odd are index follow. There is a high proportion of Meta No Index tags - can that harm our SEO efforts? thanks, Ben
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Rel Canonical and Rel No Index, Follow
Hi, Cant implement rel next and prev as getting difficulty in coding - tried lot for same, but to no luck... Considering now rel=canonical and rel noindex,follow to 2 sections Deals and Discounts - We have been consistenly ranking on first position for over 1.5 yr, however recently slipped to position 4,5 on many keywords in this section URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_offers&view=list&Itemid=9 here, the page content for page 1 and 2 pertains to the current month and from page 3 to all other pages pertains to previous months. Is adding up rel canonical from page 3 to last page to page 1 - makes sense & also simultaneously add noindex, follow from page 3 to last page News & Reviews Section - Here, all news & article items are posted. Been the links of news items are primarily there. However, the pages are not duplicates, does adding noindex, follow makes sense here URL - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=list&Itemid=10 Look forward for recommendations to implement the best - to gain SERP, avoid duplicate and white hat method.. Many thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Links via scraped / cloned content
Just been looking at some backlinks on a site - a good proportion of them are via Scraped wikipedia links or sites with similar directories to those found on DMOZ (just they have different names). To be honest, many of these sites look pretty dodgy to me, but if they're doing illegal stuff there's absolutely no way I'll be able to get links removed. Should I just sit and watch the backlinks increase from these questionable sources, or report the sites to Google, or do something else? Advice please.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What can i do with it? Black hat in my competitors.
Hi, Here we go, i have a site that is is in first page but in last positon, and i got a competitor that is in first place but his is just duplicate content for every page. He just chage the keyword but still the same content. Really, what can i do, do the same thing, i dont want black hat my site. Do i have to keepping doing my on-page and link building and do not care about him?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ex20