Canonical Query
-
If Google decides to ignore your canonical and indexes numerous versions, does that count as duplicate content?
We've got a large amount of canonicals ignored by Google, so I'm just trying to gauge if it's an issue or not.
-
Hi Ruth,
Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas)
You say the following:
- Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.
Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored.
There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands)
Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted)
Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.
-
Google can definitely choose to ignore the canonical tag, especially if they think that the page in question is a better solution to a query. I agree with the other respondents that the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level, so the duplicate content isn't an issue on your site anymore. In the meantime, some things to try:
- Make sure that your internal hierarchy makes the canonical versions more important than the duplicate versions, i.e. they appear farther up in your site nav and have more internal links pointing to them.
- Try building some external links to those pages as well, where you can.
- Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.
Are any of the duplicate pages receiving organic search traffic? If not, it may be that Google has indexed them but understands they're not as important. Again, though, the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level.
-
Sent an email, have you received it?
-
Hey Tom,
Thanks will check it out on Deep crawl hope to find out what is going on.
Tom
-
Hi Tom,
I use Moz, Screaming Frog and this canonical checker: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/canonical/dcckfeohihhlbeobohobibjbdobjbhbo?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog I'm sure that these canonicals are set up correctly.
I will send you an email to the email you have included on your profile.
Thanks,
Tom
-
It sounds to me like your problem is your CMS and your inability to access Google Webmaster tools. If you're going off of Google analytics, that's not going to tell you entire story. Use Moz, Deep Crawl, or screaming frog to determine other or not your canonicals are set up correctly.
It is possible that they're being blocked I some code error. And not being picked up by Googlebot.
Please run your site through the tools suggested and let me know if you need help in the form of somebody to run those tools for you I am willing to add that it is a code error, not Google deciding to ignore properly set up canonicals.
Google Analytics will show you whenever somebody has clicked on it does not mean that the bot is following that URL.
Without seeing more I really couldn't tell you much more unfortunately. If you can private message me with your domain if you'd like and I will check it out.
Hope this helps,Tom
Tom
-
Thank you for your responses. Hopefully someone who may have experienced this before will be able to contribute. It seems there's very little in this area about the potential impacts.
-
I believe you could be at risk of duplicate content issues. If it were my client, I'd definitely consider this a code-red issue and attack it from all possible angles.
-
Yep clean URLs there.
So, do you believe that Google ignoring these canonicals is something we should be worried about? (Basically setting a high priority so development sorts these issues out)
-
Hmm...only other thing I can think of is your that XML sitemap may contain these additional URL strings, but I assume you've already got clean URLs there.
-
Yeah they're definitely right, as a whole our canonicals Google agree with, but there's various batches that Google chooses to ignore.
Unfortunately I don't have access to search console, I have access to GA but that's it. I have to rely on third party tools and other things to try and see the impact. We also have a very restrictive platform which requires things to go through development. So i'm just trying to gauge the seriousness of this issue so that I can do a priority list.
To put the scale into perspective, it looks as if Google is ignoring the majority of our product URLs (thanks to a product recommendation software we use) and is using a different url path. Same with breadcrumbs.
255k indexed pages, ignored canonicals that i've found run to about 15k from just the two above.
-
That's odd, I've never seen a case where Google ignored canonical tags. Since I don't have an example, I have to ask, are your canonical tags in the right place?
Another thing you might try, have you set up parameter handling in Search Console?
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
-
Best use of Canonical Tag with Mini-Websites
Hello, I was wondering what the best way would be to implement Canonical Tags in kind of a unusual situation. The company I work for creates single property websites for real estate agents. We register a URL such as 123MainSt.com - however through DNS we redirect that to a path. For example: http://www.944milmadadr.com would redirect to: https://www.qwikvid.com/realestate/go/v1/home/?idx=wDg1Gdwt7wnQiR3LMeCx28qPnWTKM0JV If we wanted to rank high in the search engines for our clients: "944 Milmada Dr" - Would it be the best practice to Canonical: http://www.944milmadadr.com ? Thanks in advance for any feedback on this!! Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Qwikvid0 -
Rel Canonical for HTTP and HTTPS pages
My website has a login that has HTTPS pages. If the visitors doesn't log in they are given an HTTP page that is similar, but slightly different. Should I sure a Rel Canonical for these similar pages and how should that be set up? HTTP to HTTPS version or the other way around? Thank you, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoeyGedgaud1 -
Duplicate Content Errors new website. How do you know which page to put the rel canonical tag on?
I am having problems with duplicate content. This is a new website and all the pages have the same page and domain rank, the following is an example of the homepage. How do you know which page to use the canonical tag on? http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php http://medresourcesupply.com/ Would this be the correct way to use this? Here is another example where Moz says these are duplicates. I can't figure out why because they have different url's and content. http://medresourcesupply.com/clutching_at_the_throat http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=detailed_specfications &category=Main
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz0 -
High level rel=canonical conceptual question
Hi community. Your advice and perspective is greatly appreciated. We are doing a site replatform and I fear that serious SEO fundamentals were overlooked and I am not getting straight answers to a simple question: How are we communicating to search engines the single URL we want indexed? Backstory: Current site has major duplicate content issues. Rel-canonical is not used. There are currently 2 versions of every category and product detail page. Both are indexed in certain instances. A 60 page audit has recommends rel=canonical at least 10 times for the similar situations an ecommerce site has with dupe urls/content. New site: We are rolling out 2 URLS AGAIN!!! URL A is an internal URL generated by the systerm. We have developed this fancy dynamic sitemap generator which looks/maps to URL A and creates a SEO optimized URL that I call URL B. URL B is then inserted into the site map and the sitemap is communicated externally to google. URL B does an internal 301 redirect back to URL A...so in an essence, the URL a customer sees is not the same as what we want google to see. I still think there is potential for duplicate indexing. What do you think? Is rel=canonical the answer? In my research on this site, past projects and google I think the correct solution is this on each customer facing category and pdp: The head section (With the optimized Meta Title and Meta Description) needs to have the rel-canonical pointing to URL B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mm916157
example of the meta area of URL A: What do you think? I am open to all ideas and I can provide more details if needed.0 -
Canonical tag
Hi all, I have an ecommerce client and on the pages they have a drop down so customers can view via price, list etc. Natrurally I want a canonical tag on these pages, here's the question. as they have different pages of products, the canonical tag on http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7/?sort=price_asc,searchterm=,layout=grid,page=1 is to http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7. now, because the page=7 is a duplicate of the main page, shouldn't the canonical just be to the main page rather than page=7? Even when there is a canonical tag on the /Christmas/page=7 to the /Christmas page? hope that makes sense to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Set up a rel canonical
I have a question. I was wondering, if it was possible to set up a rel canonical. When I can't access the non canonical pages? For example, my site as at www.site.com , but the non cannocail is at site.com is their any way to set thet up without actually edting it at site.com ? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
How To Remve Rel Canonical Error from site
Hello friends, I have a site there I install all in one SEO plugin when I add my site at seomoz.org after the crawling results it so there are a penalty of Rel Conanical tag error but when I see my editor code there I see that all in one seo automatically giving rel conanical tag. Now I don’t understand that why seomoz giving these errors. Please help me to resolve this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Hash as a Replacement for Absolute URL in Canonical Tags?
Any idea why companies like Skechers would be doing this: http://screencast.com/t/ooEkATGN7EX ? I suppose it makes sense, but I've never seen it done before. If this works, why on earth would we be using absolute URLs still?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0