Is your live site supposed to have rel canonical tags?
-
I recently started working for a company and got them to use Moz and I have found that our secure site and our live sites are creating "duplicate content" according to the Crawl Diagnostics feature. On our secure site we have rel canonical tags pointing to our live site. I'm not super familiar with rel canonical tags, but our developer says we're doing the right thing. Would love any insight you guys may have if this is actually duplicate content or not. Thanks so much!
-
Agree with Dave's comments. 1) Get the syntax updated on your canonical links at a minimum. 2) Yes your canonical solution will "work", but it is not best practice. This "solution" is really a last resort. I would try and push to move away from using canonicals this way. You optimally want 1 URL.
Just to add some color, a great / classic video on this was made by Matt Cutts. He gives all kinds of examples where you could have duplicate URLs, i.e. www vs non www subdomain, sorting parameters added onto the URL, different file extensions, capitalization changes, etc. He then gives 3 options to fix them.
-
Best practice: Fix your site where you only have one URL per content item and link to it consistently (Best solution)
-
Use 301 redirects to consolidate to one URL (Next best solution)
-
Use a canonical link, if you cannot do 1 or 2. (Last resort)
Note that Matt says that they treat a canonical as a strong suggestion (it is treated similar to a 301), but they do not always have to follow it. He repeatedly says, use the first two options, and would NOT recommend a canonical as your best or first option.
My favorite quote is at 2:24 in the video, "Developers keep SEOs in business"
What your developer may notice is that Matt does say that using a canonical link for consolidating http and https will work. No one here would say that it would not, it is just not optimal. Sure, you can use a pair of scissors to cut your lawn, "it will work". It doesn't mean it's the best idea. I would think any developer worth his/her salt would want to have "clean code" and having duplicate URLs is not "clean" by SEO standards
Ok, so now you need to go back to the developer or your manager with an argument that is stronger than just, "Well, some random dude on the Moz forum said that Matt Cutt's from Google said it was preferred not to use a canonical link even though it would work". I would never want to leave you in such a position. Here is what will/can happen over time if you stay with your current setup.
-
Report consolidation issues. When you look at GA for traffic or OSE for links, any spidering tool for technical issues, social sharing counts, you now have split data for any given page potentially. Sure there are ways around this, but now you have to spend all your time "fixing" reports that should not be broken to start with. Trust me, this will come back to bite you on the bum and will cripple your efforts to show the efficacy of your SEO work. Now who really wants that?
-
Link juice consolidation issues. With any redirect - you lose a bit of link juice. If you have links to both sets of URLs, any single page is not getting as much credit as it should.
-
Down the line 301 redirect bloat. If you ever change anything and need to setup a 301 redirect, now you have to setup 2 of them and having too many 301s can negatively impact server performance.
One last thing. If you can get the URLs consolidated into one using 301s etc. Go with the https That is the way that we are headed with the web and so you might as well get going in that direction.
Good luck!
-
-
I really appreciate the response and the added information. I guess we will see if anyone else responds!
-
I'd be interested in hearing what someone else has to say about the way the canonicals are coded. You're doing yours similar to the way I do DNS Prefetching with the double slash to start the URL:
It works fine with prefetching as all the browser needs to do is find the IP of the domain but I'm not sure here how it'll handle sub-directories including www and I hate variables even when they're "it should work". The more common way to canonicalize your secured page would be:
/>
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any direct experience with this but at the core of technical SEO issues I always lean to "most common usage" and "how Google shows it in their examples" just to make sure there is minimal chance of hiccups or issues.
That aside though, the developer is right though I'd always still prefer to just see the pages at a single URL. Since that can't be done however ... canonicals are the way to go.
-
That is correct! Here is an example of two URL's of what i'm talking about:
http://www.agroup.com/blog/5-signs-of-a-good-clientagency-relatoinship
https://agrouptt4.secure2.agroup.com/blog/5-signs-of-a-good-clientagency-relatoinshipDoes this help clarify my question? I hope so!
-
I'm not sure I entirely understand the scenario so let me note how I'm hearing it to make sure my understanding is correct to put the answer into context. Please do let me know if my understanding of the scenario is wrong as that may well change my thoughts on it.
You note that your secure site and live site are creating duplicate content. Of course a secure site can be live but I'm taking this to mean you have an area behind a login. That it's creating duplicate content is making me think that a lot of the core information is the same and I'm guessing many of the same pages.
If this is all correct and you can't put the duplicated pages onto one URL only then the canonicals are the way to go and your developer is correct.
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
-
Unsolved Moz Pro crawl signaling missing canonical which are not?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | rolandvintners
I'm trying MozPro considering using it.
One of the tool which is appealing is the crawl and insights.
After quick use, I really question many of the alerts, for instance, I got a "missing canonical tag" on this url: https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto#2020 but when I check my markup, there's clearly a canonical tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto"> Anybody can explain?
I asked Moz Pro staff when being onboarded but didn't get an answer...
Honestly, I'm questioning the value of these crawls, or may be I miss something?0 -
Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site
Hi Moz Community, I have been conducting some link auditing and started comparing the Moz Spam Analysis tool with the links provided in Google WMT. It appears that the Moz Spam Analysis tools shows an aggregate of links that Moz may or may not consider spam, however when you download and look at Google's "Links to Your Site" list it provides every link iteration known to man that's pointing to the target website - without providing any hints as to whether or not a link may be considered spam by Google. The biggest concern I have here is that Google is picking up a lot of links, which I consider spam, that do not appear in the Moz Spam Analysis results. I guess the question(s) I have are: Does it make sense to compare these two data sets? Has anyone else tried this comparison and how did you use the information to make positive changes? Any recommendations when it comes to determining if an external link is spam/hurting/helping a website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | GoogleDowner0 -
How do you check the outbound links of a site?
There are great tools like http://www.opensiteexplorer.org that will tell you all about the inbound links. What about the more basic and easier question: What outgoing links does this site have?
Moz Pro | | SkinLaboratory2 -
Very confused on site.com/ or not using a /
I'm wanting to put the rel="canonical" tag on my homepage but I'm not sure which to use? How would you know what to use and always links to, http://www.site.com or http://www.site.com**/** Personally I never knew there was a difference until I used the seomoz tool and I wasn't using the tag.
Moz Pro | | GYMSN0 -
Help with duplicate title tags?
I was looking in Google webmaster tools and it says I have 95 duplicate title tags for my site Noah's Dad. When I look through the list it appears the pages with duplicate title tags are some of my category pages, archive pages, and some author pages... Not sure if you guys can use some of the tools to see what is actually showing up duplicate or not, and if you need more info just let me know. But I wanted to see if this is something I should be concerned with? Should WMT also say 0 in duplicate content? It seems like when I started my blog I was told no to be conceded with this sort of stuff in gwmt. Anyways...I just wanted to see what you guys think. (By the way, is there any way to tell what this duplicate content is having (or has had) on my SERP results? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
How to force a recrawl of a site?
Hi, I made changes in my site. I would like to see the result of the crawl diagnostic. I know the crawl is happening every week, however, is there a way to force a re-crawl in order not to have to wait 5 days? Cheers,
Moz Pro | | nuxeo0 -
Tool which shows site ranking for a given keyword
Hi all. I have a client with a specific request and wanted to ask if there is a reliable tool which allows a user to enter a given site and keyword, and it will return the site's ranking for that keyword. More specifically: Needs to work for Google, Yahoo and Bing Needs to work for various countries such as Google.ca, Google.it, etc. Needs to show at least the top ?10k rankings, not just the top 50 The last requirement is the challenge. I clearly recognize anything past the top 50 or so ranks is really off the map, but the client would like to view his current standings.
Moz Pro | | RyanKent0 -
Meta description tag in rss xml file?
The SEOmoz crawl diagnostic tool is complaining that I'm missing a meta description tag from a file that is an RSS xml file. In my <channel>section I do have a <description>tag. Is this a bug in the SEOmoz tool or do I need to add another tag to satisify the warning?</description></channel>
Moz Pro | | scanlin0