Rel=canonical vs noindex/follow - tabs with individual URLs
-
Hi everyone
I've got a situation that I haven't seen in quite this way before. I would like some advice on whether I should be rel=canonicalzing of noindexing/following a range of pages on a clients website.
I've just started working on a website that creates individual URLs for tabs within each page which has resulted in several URLs being created for each listing:
Example URLs:
- hotel-downtown-calgary
- hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery?tab
- hotel-downtown-calgary?tab
- hotel-downtown-calgary/map?tab
- hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities?tab
- hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab
- hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area?tab
Google has indexed over 1500 pages with the "?tab" parameter (there are 4380 page indexed for the site in total), and also seems to be indexing some of these pages without the "?tab" parameter i.e. ("hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews" instead of "hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab") so the amount of potential duplication could be more. These tabbed pages are getting minimal traffic from organic search, so I've got no issues with taking them out of the index - the question is how.
There are the issues I see:
- Each tab has the same title as the other tabs for each location, so lots of title duplication.
- Each individual tab doesn't have much content (although the content each tab has is unique).
I would usually expect the tabs to be distinguished by the parameters only, not have unique URLs - if that was the case we wouldn't have a duplication issue.
So the question is: rel=canonical or noindex/follow? I can see benefits of both.
Looking forward to your thoughts!
-
Well, you are on the right path with thinking on how to reduce the amount of unneeded pages.
Here is how I would approach it.
-
Check the query volume levels on those specific queries "Map to XXX"
-
Check the search volume on those pages.
See if you can detect a pattern that there is search volume to justify those searches, do they result in significant traffic to those pages. Then try and determine, what is the content on all those separate pages and is it any good? Are they making extra pages to make extra pages? Sure, in theory you could do a page per query, but I would bet if they have a ton of hotel, all the info on those pages is a bunch of boilerplate crap copied from somewhere else. Even if the search volume was there, do they have a good enough page with good content to rank for it?
Now that we have hummingbird type algos in Google, it reduces the need to get so specific for matching on queries on a page by page basis. Build a single, awesome, page that is really helpful to users and has original content, that is how you win for the big queries and then fill in for the rest. You can then use the title, description and H1, H2 headings to show the important information.
Remember that the rel=canonical will help Google understand what your main page is and what your secondary/duplicate pages are in this specific case, but I am not sure that Google would see it as the consolidated awesome single page.
Rel=canonical is more for showing how the parts are just parts of a whole page that is already there, it is more to help clean up duplicate content
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
As I read your post originally, this seemed to be more of the issue. This was why I was encouraging you to take the content in the tab (that did not seem substantial) and put it on the main page and use the canonical or if the content was junk then it did not matter as much.
Hope that makes sense.
-
-
Hello CleverPHD!
Thank you very much for your response - that really clears a few things up. Most info around rel=canonical revolves around duplicate content so I just wanted to make sure!
Regarding your separate question, your assumption is correct, each hotel on the site is set up this way (and there are hundreds of them) which is why I am concerned.
I've just come into this project but I assume that the initial thinking was going to be that they wanted to rank for a range of search terms around the hotel i.e. "Xxx Hotel reviews", "map to Xxx Hotel" etc and thought that dedicated pages for each term would help them.
What I am hoping is that by rel=canonicaling these pages to the main Hotel URL we will in effect be creating the "really awesome" page you refer to, while avoiding any potential penalties!
Once again, thanks for your in depth response - it's very much appreciated!
-
The rel=canonical is what you need to do right now to help fix this. Google has already indexed all of those tabbed pages and you need to make sure that Google knows that they are subsections of the main page and how it all fits together. The canonical is treated like a 301 redirect. Doing that should take care of the extra pages indexed. If you can 301 those tabbed pages that would be a good option as well, not a good option if you do not want to lose the content on those tabbed pages though.
Right now, I would not use no-follow on links or no-index meta tags on the tabbed pages. If you use no-follow, you are telling Google to not follow that tab link and so it is not able to crawl over the the tabbed page and see the canonical link. Second, if you have a noindex meta on that tabbed page, it tells Google to take the page out of the index and would probably conflict with the canonical link as well.
The only way you would want to use no-follow or noindex meta tags or blocking in robots.txt is if 1) the content is not worth indexing and/or ranking and or 2) it is not in the index already and you want to keep Google out of this stuff.
Ultimately, I would try and get the stuff on the tabbed sections onto the main page and then use the noindex meta tag on the tabbed pages so that you can get rid of the tabbed pages all together and not work about losing the content that is in the tabbed section. If you can do that, it would be a better approach than the canonical option, but it looks like you may not have that option at this time. All those extra tab pages are just wasting Google's time crawling pages that do not matter (most likely).
If you did not care about the content on the tabbed pages, I would just 410 them right now and get rid of the links to the tabs on the main pages.
Hope the above makes sense, tried to answer the "it depends" scenarios.
Feel free to ignore this next part, but I have a separate question if you drop the whole tab pages issue and look at this at a higher level. Looking at this subsection of URLs from above
- hotel-downtown-calgary
- hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery
- hotel-downtown-calgary/map
- hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities
- hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews
- hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area
Would not all the above pages really need to be about a single hotel or a category page on all the hotels in downtown calgary? Unless you have enough search query volume to support a separate page for each of them, seems like if you put the content on all the pages listed above into a single page, you would have a really awesome page about either a specific downtown calgary hotel or all the hotels in downtown calgary.
-
Thanks for that Dana - appreciated.
At the moment it is currently set to Let Googlebot decide and I need admin access to look under the hood which I don't have, so I'll have a look when I gain administrator access. I can see one potential issue through - some of their landing pages don't exist without the "?tab" parameter which I think might make this a non starter unfortunately.
Given the possibility that this method doesn't work, does anyone else have any thoughts on rel=canonical vs noindex in this situation?
-
Hi Damon,
I believe there may be a third option. In Google Search Console, there is the option to tell Googlebot not to crawl and index URLs containing certain parameters. In this case, it seems like it would be easiest to indicated to Googlebot that anything with the ?tab parameter should be excluded from crawling and indexing.
You can find this in Google Search Console by navigating to "Crawl" and then "URL Parameters," then click "Configure URL Parameters" and Google will show you a list of potential candidates for exclusion.
Hope that's helpful...it's my understanding that Yahoo/Bing have something similar but I've never used those.
Cheers,
Dana
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
-
URL Structure on Category Pages
Hi, Currently, we having the following URL Structure o our product pages: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/283/All_Products.html Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/4/Clothing.html Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale/product/LOAD-HE-WOM/Assorted-High-End-Women-Clothing-Lots.html?cid=4 Since we are going to use another frontend system, we are thinking about re-working on this URL Structure, using something like this: All Products Pages: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/ Category Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/ Product Page: www.viatrading.com/wholesale-products/category/product-title/ I understand this is better for SEO and user experience. However, we already have good traffic on the current URL Structure. Should we use same left-side filters on Category Pages as in All Products Page? Since we are using Faceted Navigation, when users filter the Category (e.g. Clothing) they will see same page as Clothing Category Page. Is that an issue for Duplicate Content? Since we are a wholesale company - I understand is using "/wholesale/products/" in URL for all product pages a good idea? If so, should we avoid word "wholesale" in product-title to avoid repeated word in URL? For us, SKU in URL helps the company employees and maybe some clients identify the link. However, what do you think of using the SEO-friendly product-title, and 301 redirect it to www.viatrading.com/BRTA-LN-DISHRACKS/, so 1st link is only used by company members and Canonicalized 2nd is the only one seen by general public? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | viatrading10 -
I still don't understand how rel=canonical works. Help?
So here's the deal. I write for many different outlets. I also have many different pages on my blog that have duplicates (authorized, of course). On my blog, I have many different pages that redirect to "the original" content. I've only recently discovered the existence of rel=canonical. However I don't understand how it works. I have very specific questions. Can anyone help? If, on my blog, I have a blog post that's the original. And another website has the same content, used with authorization. If I want to tell search engines that the original content is on MY blog, what can I do? Is the only solution to ask the owner of the other blog to add a rel=canonical in the header of the specific post? If, on my blog, I have a blog post that's NOT the original. Do I simply add rel=canonical to the header, then add a link to the original in the body? If, on my blog, I have THE FIRST 300 WORDS of a blog post, then add a link saying "to read the whole article, click here" with a link pointing to the original, do I need to have a rel=canonical tag somewhere? Does it HAVE to be in the header? Can rel=canonical be used in the - What penalties are included with having duplicate content of my work everywhere on the web? I've been trying to find specifics, but can't. Thanks for the help. I'm quite confused, as you can see.
On-Page Optimization | | cedriklizotte0 -
Rel="Canonical"
Hi!, We´ve just launched a new website and on this web we are using a lot Call to Actions on every page of the web and all of this CTA`s goes to the same Landing Page. (Ej: http://www.landing page.com) The problem comes when Google says this Landing Page is duplicate content because we are using some parameters like, for instance, http://www.landing page.com/?fuente=Soporteensalesforce So now we have just 1 Landing Page but Google sees 13 pages, because of this parameters and Moz alerted me that Google is seeing it as duplicate content. Yesterday I put this on the head of the only Landing Page we have so Google can see it in the proper way, as just one landing, but I don´t know if it is enough or should I do anything else? What I put on the Head: Hope someone can help me about this because I´ve tried to find a solution and this is the only thing that came up to me, and don´t know if it´s the right thing. Thanks for your time!
On-Page Optimization | | Manuel_LeadClic0 -
Noindex pages being indexed
Hi all Wondering if anyone could offer a pointer on a problem i am having please. I am developing an affiliate store and to prevent problems with duplicate content I have added name="robots" content="NOINDEX,FOLLOW" /> to all the product pages to avoid google penalties. However, Google appears to be indexing product pages. When I do a site: search I see a few hundred product pages in the engine. This is odd as the site has always had noindex on these pages. Even viewing the cache of the indexed page shows the noindex meta tag to be in place. I'm at a loss as to why these pages are being indexed and could do with removing them asap to stop any penalties on the site. Many thanks for any help.
On-Page Optimization | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
Can Sitemap Be Used to Manage Canonical URLs?
We have a duplicate content challenge that likely has contributed to us loosing SERPs especially for generic keywords such as "audiobook," "audiobooks," "audio book," and "audio books." Our duplicate content is on two levels. 1. The first level is at our web store, www.audiobooksonline.com. Audiobooks are sometimes published in abridged, unabridged, on compact discs, on MP3 CD by the same publisher. In this case we use the publisher description of the story for each "flavor" = duplicate content. Can we use our sitemap to identify only one "flavor" so that a spider doesn't index the others? 2. The second level is that most online merchants of the same publisher's audio book use the same description of the story = lots of duplicate content on the Web. In that we have 11,000+ audio book titles offered at our Web store, I expect Google sees us as having lots of duplicated (on the Web) content and devalues our site. Some of our competitors who rank very high for our generic keywords use the same publisher's description. Any suggestions on how we could make our individual audio book title pages unique will be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | lbohen0 -
Rel=author WP Plugin
Anyone find a WP plugin they like for rel=author and rel=publisher markup? I'd love to find one that gives and about the author at the end of a blog, and tags the G+ page on the end for rich snippets. Does that exist?? 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | AESEO0 -
Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.
Please clarify: In the page optimization tool, seomoz recommends using the canonical url tag on the unique page itself. Is it the same canonical url tag used when want juice to go to the original page? Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today. Please give example.
On-Page Optimization | | AllIsWell0 -
Tool for Generating Sitemap/ URL List
HI, I'm looking for a tool that'll generate a URL list for a site. I looked at this thread here http://www.seomoz.org/q/online-sitemap-generator which came up when I searched for sitemap generator. However, I don't need a sitemap per se, and I don't need to submit it to Google - just a list of pages is what I need.If it updated automatically, that would be useful as well. Anyone know of a tool, on or offline? Or anyone used Xenu and know if it's what I'm looking for? Or is there a simple solution that I'm missing? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | 5225Marketing0