Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Rel=canonical on Godaddy Website builder
-
Hey crew!
First off this is a last resort asking this question here. Godaddy has not been able to help so I need my Moz Fam on this one.
So common problem
My crawl report is showing I have duplicate home pages www.answer2cancer.org and www.answer2cancer.org/home.html
I understand this is a common issue with apache webservers which is why the wonderful rel=canonical tag was created! I don't want to go through the hassle of a 301 redirect of course for such a simple issue.
Now here's the issue. Godaddy website builder does not make any sense to me. In wordpress I could just go add the tag to the head in the back end. But no such thing exist in godaddy. You have to do this weird drag and drop html block and drag it somewhere on the site and plug in the code. I think putting before the code instead of just putting it in there. So I did that but when I publish and inspect in chrome I cannot see the tag in the head!
This is confusing I know. the guy at godaddy didn't stand a chance lol.
Anyway much love for any replies!
-
Thanks Rhonda! It sounds like this thread will benefit many people then.
-
Thomas,
I am on GoDaddy's Website Builder as well and had the exact same issue that brought me to this thread. I did what they suggested and it got rid of my crawler seeing a duplicate with the home.html page.
Here is what I did:
- In ALL menu navigations, I replaced the links to home.html with the root URL of my domain (like http://myurl.com) I had to do this for my main navigation at the top of my website and then a footer navigation that I had.
- Then, for my logo image in my header, I had to change the link from the home.html page to the same root URL.
After I did this, I did a recrawl and now home.html is not being found and therefore, not showing up as a duplicate.
Would have been nice to have been able to put in a canonical reference but you get what you get and for the flexibility of Website Builder for a quick website, I'll take the extra work to get it just right
Good luck!
-Rhonda
-
Sadly I completely believe you.
If it's not cost or time prohibitive, I'd recommend moving to Godaddy's Wordpress hosting package and rebuild the site in Wordpress, which won't have these problems. Godaddy might even offer a conversion package of some kind.
Otherwise you might try a website builder option like Squarespace instead, which is also fairly decent for basic SEO considerations like this.
-
Guys your not going to believe this but neither of those two things are possible on godaddy website builder. Maybe I should just pack up the gloves and chalk this one for a loss. Does it really even matter? Could the crawl report be wrong? These are the things that keep me up at night.
-
Good call on GTM - I always forget about the ability to add normal HTML snippets.
-
Thomas,
I agree with everything Kane suggested. Additionally, you might ask GoDaddy if you can add some Google Tag Manager code to the site so you can edit header and body code without messing with Godaddy's website builder. It might be a learning curve for you, but Google has good documentation and courses on how to use GTM.
-
I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.
Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.
You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.
Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.
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
-
Redirecting an Entire Website?
Is it best to redirect an old website to a new website page by page to like pages or just the entire site all at once to the home page of the new site? I do have about 10 good pages on the site that are worth directing to corresponding pages on the new site. Just trying to figure out what is going to preserve the most link juice. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | photoseo10 -
Why Google de-rank a website.
Hi, I was inspecting a website which is covering the topic of best wheelbarrow of 2021, it is a new website and and starts ranking on google. But, after few days it got de-rank automatically and Moz is also not showing any result to that. I was wandering why this just happened and what should I do if I made my website and will not face this kind of situation?
Technical SEO | | Moeen22330 -
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
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 -
How to SEO a Website Built off Godaddy?
I have a client whose website is built off Godaddy services. I know Godaddy is not the right choice for building a website, but what's done is done. The client has already bought the Godaddy services and there's no way I can tell him to go rebuild his website before we could optimize it for SEO. I'm already facing a lot of challenges while optimizing on-page elements. When I wanted to verify the ownership for Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool via his Godaddy account. the process failed many times. it looks like Godaddy is using some kind of caching not allowing us to modify the codes. For example, I'd applied the site verification codes for Webmasters Tool 48 hours ago, and the metatag for google site verification is not yet updated in the frontend. It's quite frustrating. What would you suggest?
Technical SEO | | suskanchan1 -
Rel="external"
Hi all, I got a link and its off a site and marked up with rel="external". Is this a followed or nofollowed link? Does it pass link juice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sharer0 -
How to structure rel=canonical for a e commerce site
Hello, So I have searched the Q & A , Google, the zen cart forum and at this point I am looking for some one to give a concrete answer on what I should do. There is a lot of different opinions on " rel=canonical" and how to apply it , since there are many other variable in place. I have a zen cart site. I am using the latest 1.3.9 version. The default setting ( seem to me) uses the rel=canonical to point back to the specific link product or category respectively. Most of the time I have two scenarios. 1. Main category ---> Sub category----> Product 2. Main Category----> Product I'll give an example http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards ---main category http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards/acrylic-awards sub category http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards/acrylic-awards/slanted-award product (this example has three sub categories with maybe 12 products in one 4 in the second and 5 in the third) From looking at the source code for each url it the rel=canonical just points back to its own url. I want to avoid competing against my self, for the example above keyword "acrylic awards" so should the use of the re=canonical be changes site wide to have products point back to sub categories when they exist and have products point back to main categories when no sub categories exist? I am very new to seo, specifically eCommerce seo. If you have experience and have done this to a site you manage for a client or your own please advise how to proceed. Also if I'm missing some thing that will give me a better understanding of the bigger seo picture that would be great. Thanks, Yevgeny
Technical SEO | | Yevgeny0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050