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
-
Penalized By Google
My site name is bestmedtour .it's in English. I also want to have the Arabic version of the site. If I translate it with Google Translate, is it possible that the Arabic version of the site will be penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aalinlandacc0 -
What is Google supposed to return when you submit an image URL into Fetch as Google? Is a few lines of readable text followed by lots of unreadable text normal?
I am seeing something like this (Is this normal?): HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Autoboof
Server: nginx
Content-Type: image/jpeg
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Last-Modified: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:23:04 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=1209600
Expires: Fri, 27 Nov 2015 15:23:55 GMT
X-Request-ID: v-8dd8519e-8a1a-11e5-a595-12313d18b975
X-AH-Environment: prod
Content-Length: 25505
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 15:24:11 GMT
X-Varnish: 863978362 863966195
Age: 16
Via: 1.1 varnish
Connection: keep-alive
X-Cache: HIT
X-Cache-Hits: 1 ����•JFIF••••��;CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v80), quality = 75
��C•••••••••• •
••
••••••••• $.' ",# (7),01444 '9=82<.342��C• ••••
•2! !22222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222��•••••v••"••••••�� ••••••••••••••••
•���•••••••••••••}•••••••!1A••Qa•"q•2���•#B��•R��$3br�
••••%&'()*456789:CDEFGHIJSTUVWXYZcdefghijstuvwxyz��������������������������������������������������������������������������� •••••••••••••••••••
•���••••••••••••••w••••••!1••AQ•aq•"2�••B���� #3R�•br�0 -
What is better? No canonical or two canonicals to different pages?
I have a blogger site that is adding parameters and causing duplicate content. For example: www.mysite.com/?spref=bl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TMI.com
www.mysite.com/?commentPage=1 www.mysite.com/?m=1 www.mysite.com/?m=0 I decided to implement a canonical tag on these pages pointing to the correct version of the page. However, for the parameter ?m=0, the canonical keeps pointing to itself. Ex: www.mysite.com/?m=0 The canonical = www.mysite.com/?m=0 So now I have two canonicals for the same page. My question is if I should leave it, and let Google decide, or completely remove the canonicals from all pages?0 -
Google is not honoring my descriptions
I finally got our title tags honored and now Google is just making the descriptions whatever it wants. This is happening on pretty much every one of our pages. An example: http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/plan-explorer/sql-server-query-view SERPS = SQL Server MVP Aaron Bertrand shares a demo kit for Plan Explorer to give you better insight into the advantages of the tool, and to help you share its virtues ... Description tag = SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a free query plan analysis tool that will allow you to find the most expensive operators by CPU, I/O, or both. I can see the description tag when I view source so I know that it is pulling it from the table correctly. What can I do to fix this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sika220 -
How does Google or Bing Recognise my Blog?
I have a blog as part of my site http://www.over50choices.co.uk/Community/Ashleys-Blog.aspx and has been live for approx 10 weeks, but i dont think google recognises is yet as a Blog. Is there anything that i can do to speed this up? We have posted about 25 posts. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep1
Ash0 -
Canonical links apparently not used by google
hi, I do have an ecommerce website (www.soundcreation.ro) which in the last 3 months had a drop in the SERP. Started to look around in GWT what is happening. Google is reporting a lot of duplicate meta-tags (and meta-titles problem). But 99% of them had already canonical links setted. I tried to optimize my product listings with the new "prev", "next" tags and introduced also the "view-all" canonical link to help Google identify the appropiate product listing pages. SeoMoz is not reporting thos duplicate meta issues. Here is an example of the same page with different links, but with the same common canonical and reported by GWT "duplicate title tag": http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10-pageall/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-chitari-electroacustice-cid10_999/http://www.soundcreation.ro/chitare-electro-acustice-cid10_1510/What could be the issue?- only that gwt is not refreshing as should be, keeping old errors?- if so, then there is an other serious issue because of why our PR is dropping on several pages?- do we have other problem with the site, which ends up with google penalizing us? Thank you for your ideas!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjutas0 -
Can google read ajax
Looking to load a one page product view instead of 10 pages of pagination. Does google read ajax and see all 10 pages as 1 page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Archers1 -
IP address being indexed by Google in addition to canonical domain.
Our site's IP address is being indexed in addition to the canonical www.example.com domain. As soon as it was flagged a 301 was implemented in the .htaccess file to redirect the IP address to the canonical. Does this usually occur? Is it detrimental to SEO? In my time in SEO I've never heard of this being an issue, or being part of a list of things to be checked. It sounds more like a server that wasn't configured correctly when hosting was set up? It didn't seem to be affecting the site at all, but is it more common and I've just never heard of it? 😛 Should it be something I'm usually looking for in future? Responses are greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeimrie0