Canonical on ecommerce site
-
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag?
Thanks in advance.
-
Thumbs up and helpful answers always appreciated
-
OK thank you both for your responses! I really appriciate the help!
-
Hi Gordian,
That's what I thought. If you simply want Google to ignore a URL parameter, you can go in Webmaster Tool and select to ignore it. You can do the same with Bing in their Webmaster Center at http://www.bing.com/webmaster/
If you are still worried, you could as well implement the canonical tag, but, of course, do it with caution so you don't end up losing all your rankings!
Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer. -
Yup, in theory.
I mean that's how it's supposed to be used, so if it was set up correctly that should be right
You can also tell Google to ignore parameters in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling but only do this if you're confident it won't mess anything up. Canonical should be fine.
-
Thanks for the response. I do not have any duplicate problems right now, but am looking into adding the canonical tag because it is required with things like rich snippets (via feed instead of code). So I felt if I had it on all product and cat pages then that way I could solve the problem of the having affiliate coded links attached going to the page as well.
Example.
www.widget.com/product?utm_medium=referral
is the same as
so if the canonical tag was on www.widget.com/product then it would automatically canonicalize the www.widget.com/product?utm_medium=referral entrance.
Is that true or is my thinking off?
Thanks!
-
is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url.
No. You'll end up with a mess of a site. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization
In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes?
As stated, no that wouldn't solve it, but this is the sort of thing canonicalization is for. If you can get to product A via site/colour/product-a and site/brand/product-a then the canonical tag is to tell search engines that both of these pages are the same and then you state which is the 'official' one. Same situation if you had site/brand/product-a?affiliate-id=12345.
Is there a better way to handle this?
Must be I assume that each page is it's own entry in your CMS, rather than there being an identical entry for each path into it. As you said each page should reference itself on the desired absolute URL (and not the one displayed), how you determine what that is and impliment it site wide though will depend on your CMS and require a bit of planning.
-
Hi Gordian,
I would say that the best way to implement the canonical tag is by not implementing it. You should always prefer using 301 redirects over rel canonical and what would be even better is to simply not having the same content on different URL.
I suggest you read this article from Paddy Moogan :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-useIf you are tired of reading guides and articles and you want a direct answer to your question, I suggest your post more details about the specific problem you are trying to avoid with some url examples.
Best regards
Guillaume Voyer.
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
-
Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Hi! As above, I wrote this article on my medium blog but am now launching my site, UnderstandingJiuJitsu.com. I have the post saved as a draft because I don't want to get pinged by google. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming the UJJ.com post is original when medium was posted first? Thanks and health, Elliott
Technical SEO | | OpenMat0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Poor Site Performance
Hello, A couple of months ago, this site was dropped from google due to a noindex, nofollow tag thewealthymind(dot)com It's back up, but performing poorly. Take for example the term "The 4 step belief change" in the home page title tag. This site is the #1 authority on that and yet it ranks 3rd below weaker pages. There's 180 404 errors in GWT, many from past versions of pages of the site but also including thewealthymind(dot)com/index.html and thewealthymind(dot)com/index.htm even though there is a rel=cononical tag on the home page. What's the process of getting this site back to health?
Technical SEO | | BobGW0 -
Trying to get google to know my site is a magazine site is this wrong
Hi, i have put a line to describe what my site is at the top of my site and i want to know if this is wrong or not. We have dropped frok being number one in google for lifestyle magazine to now number seven. Before we had to redo our site we were number one and then we dropepd to around number four when we finished the site and now we are number seven and i need to try and get back up there. To help google know we are a lifestyle magazine i have put a line at the top of the site and i want to know if this looks out of place and if i should take it down. i need advice on how to get google to know we are a lifestyle magazine and get back in the top five of google my site is www.in2town.co.uk any help would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0 -
If I redirect my WordPress blog to my main site, will it help my main site's SEO?
I have separate sites for my blog and main website. I'd like to link them in a way that enables the blog to boost my main site's SEO. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance for any advice...
Technical SEO | | matt-145670