Google ignoring Canonical and choosing its own
-
Hey Mozzers,
We have several products that all have upto 6 different versions, they are the same product but in a different specification. As users search via these specifications (within our website) it is beneficial to keep all 6 products as different listings on the website. In google however it is not.
So we kept all 6 listing but chose 1 to be the google landing page, the only different between them all is the technical specification + occasionally size. But 95% of the pages are the same.
Let call the products A, B, C, D, E, F, we made all the canonicals point to C because this is out best selling version of the product. However, google has chosen E to rank instead.
What is my best move here? Should i accept the page google has chosen and change the canonicals the point to that version or should I be stubborn and try to get google to change which version it ranks.
As always many thanks.
-
It's important to remember that Google in general takes canonical tags as more of a suggestion than a rule; they may decide that another page deserves to rank instead. Take a look at the version of the page that ranks: does it have more external or internal links pointing to it? You may be able to build up your canonical page by directing some additional link juice that way.
If it's all the same to you which version ranks, it might be easier to just take the hint and make the ranking page the canonical page; otherwise, it may take some time to build up those off-page signals to get that version to rank.
-
hmmm.. Interesting. Three weeks should be enough time.
The only thing I can think of is a mistake somewhere in your canonical tags. Let's see what other MOZers have to say about this.
-
Hey Dmitrii,
They all seem to be set up correctly. No mistakes mentioned in the article are present.
I've given it about 3 weeks so far, which may or may not be long enough i suppose
-
Hi there.
Have you read this? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
That might answer some of your questions.
Now, did you allow some time for Google to "realize" canonical links after you made them live?
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
-
Whats up with the last google update.
I have numerous clients who were at the top of page in the top 3 spots. They all dropped to page 3 or 4 or 2 and now they are number 1 in maps or in the top 3. Content is great on all these sites. backlinks are high quality and we do not build high quantity, we always focus on quality. the sites have authorship information. trust . we have excellent content written by professionals in the industry for each of the websites. The sites load super fast. they are very mobile friendly. we have CDN installed. content is organized per topic. all of our citations are setup properly and no duplicates, or missing citations. code is good on the websites. we do not have anchor text links pointing to the site from gust posts or whatever. we have plenty of content. our DA/PA is great. Audits of the website are great. I've been doing this a long time and ive never been so dumb founded as to what google has done this time. Or better yet what exactly is wrong with our clients websites today that was working perfectly for the last 5 years. I really am getting frustrated. im comparing my sites to competitors and everything's better. Please someone guide me here and tell me what im missing or tell me what you have done to recover from this nonsense.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waqid0 -
Canonical url issue
Canonical url issue My site https://ladydecosmetic.com on seomoz crawl showing duplicate page title, duplicate page content errors. I have downloaded the error reports csv and checked. From the report, The below url contains duplicate page content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd And other duplicate urls as per report are,
https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&click=colorsu&brands=66 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40 https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-plum-red-o-14-item-157&category_id=40&brands=66&click=brnd But on every these url(all 4) I have set canonical url. That is the original url and an existing one(not 404). https://www.ladydecosmetic.com/unik-colours-lipstick-caribbean-peach-o-27-item-162&category_id=0 Then how this issues are showing like duplicate page content. Please give me an answer ASAP.0 -
Google+ Pages on Google SERP
Do you think that a Google+ Page (not profile) could appear on the Google SERP as a Rich Snippet Author? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | overalia0 -
Who is beating you on Google (after Penguin)?
Hi,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rayvensoft
After about a month of Penguin and 1 update, I am starting to notice an annoying pattern as to who is beating me in the rankings on google. I was wondering if anybody else has noticed this.
The sites who are beating me - almost without exception - fall into these 2 categories. 1) Super sites that have little or nothing to do with the service I am offering. Now it is not the homepages that are beating me. In almost all cases they are simply pages hidden in their forums where somebody in passing mentioned something relating to what I do. 2) Nobodies. Sites that have absolutely no links back to them, and look like they were made by a 5 year old. Has anybody else noticed this? I am just wondering if what I see only apply to my sites or if this is a pattern across the web. Does this mean that for small sites to rank, it is now all about on-page SEO? If it all about on-page, well that is great... much easier than link building. But I want to make sure others see the same thing before dedicating a lot of time to overhaul my sites and create new content.| Thanks!0 -
Does Google punish sites for Backlinks?
Here is Matt Cutts video, for those of you who have not seen it already. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4dAWb5jUws (Very Short) In this Video Matt explains that Google does not look at backlinks. Many link spamming sites have detected, there have been many website receiving warning messages in their Google web tools to deindex these links, etc.. My theory is that Google will not punish sites for backlinks. However, they manually check for "link farming sites" and warn anyone affiliated with them, just in case these links were built from a competitor. This way they can eliminate all the "Bad Link Farm" sites and not hurt anyone who does not deserve to be hurt. Google is not going to give us all their information to rank, they dont want us to rank. They want us to PPC. However, they do want to have the best SERPs available. I call it Google juggling! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Choose of destination for a 301 redirection
Hi, I had a website paris-football.com which ranked quite well on specific request as 'paris football" and "paris foot". I decided 2 months ago to stop this website as I had no time to update it and it was quite rubish in terms of content and make a redirection to a better quality website. I decided to redirect to the deep url http://www.sportytrader.com/paris-foot.php . The destination Url has not beneft from the redirection and has even seen its rankings drop since the redirection. do you think that it would have been better to redirect to the Home Page http://www.sportytrader.com ? Do you think that I can still change the destination url ? Thanks a lot for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jarnac0 -
Rel Canonical Syntax
My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally. I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below). Should I be concerned? Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | costume0