Canonical tags for duplicate listings
-
Hi there,
We are restructuring a website. The website originally lists jobs that will have duplicate content. We have tried to ask the client not to use duplicates but apparently their industry is not something they can control.
The recommendations I had is to have categories (which will have the idea description for a group of jobs), and the job listing pages.
The job listing pages will then have canonical tags pointing to the category page as the primary URL to be indexed.
Another opinion came from a third party that this can be seen as if we are tricking Google and would get penalised, **Is that even true? **Why would Google penalise for this if thats their recommendations in the first place?
This third party suggested using nofollow on the links to these listings, or even not not index them all together.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks
Issa
-
You're very welcome
-Andy
-
Thank you Mike,
It helps to have two experts agreeing with me. And you are absolutely right regarding misusing the canonical tags. I will keep an eye on it for sure.
Best,
Issa -
Andy, than you very much for confirming that canonical are better than noindex in this case.
Best,
Issa
-
I agree with Andy.
In this case, there is no real reason to NoIndex/NoFollow these pages. Using rel=canonical makes sense... they provide a service and need to exist since they are individual job listings but leaving them as duplicates will hurt the site in the long run. So using a canonical to point at a Category page one level up in the site's navigation is perfectly acceptable and, from what I've seen, one of the more common uses of the canonical tag.
It's important to remember that a canonical is only a suggestion. It is possible for the spiders to decide not to respect the canonical tag if it appears to be used for manipulative purposes or if it appears that the pages are not relevant to each other. I don't believe that should be an issue in the case but its something to keep your eye on for a little while after implementing the tags.
-
Hi Issa,
There are actually very few reasons to noindex / nofollow pages these days as most issues can be handed though 301 or canonical, so if there is an option that allows this, do it.
From what you are saying, and as long as I am understanding correctly, this is just like an e-commerce site that has page 1, page 2, page 3, etc of the same product, and they all rel=canonical back to Page 1 - which is the right thing to do.
This tells Google that you know there is duplications and not to pay any attention to them, so while they are open for Google to see, it means that you won't get penalised.
So you have Job 1, Job 2, Job 3, etc, with a rel=canonical back to Job 1.
Here is a little extra reading from Google:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=enI hope that helps?
-Andy
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
-
Bigcommerce & Blog Tags causing Duplicate Content?
Curious why moz would pick up our blog tags as causing duplicate content, when each blog has a rel canonical tag pointing to either the blog post itself and on the tag pages points to the blog as a whole. Kinda want to get rid of the tags in general now, but also feel they can add some extra value to UX later on when we have many more blog posts. Curious if anyone knows a way around this or even a best solution practice when faced with such odd issues? I can see why the duplicate content would happen, but when grouping content into categories?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Should I use **tags or h1/h2 tags for article titles on my homepage**
I recently had an seo consultant recommend using tags instead of h1/h2 tags for article titles on the homepage of my news website and category landing pages. I've only seen this done a handful of times on news/editorial websites. For example: http://www.muscleandfitness.com/ Can anyone weigh in on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blankslatedumbo0 -
Duplicate Content For Product Alternative listing
Hi I have a tricky one here. cloudswave is a directory of products and we are launching new pages called Alternatives to Product X This page displays 10 products that are an alternative to product X (Page A) Lets say now you want to have the alternatives to a similar product within the same industry, product Y (Page B), you will have 10 product alternatives, but this page will be almost identical to Page A as the products are in similar and in the same industry. Maybe one to two products will differ in the 2 listings. Now even SEO tags are different, aren't those two pages considered duplicate content? What are your suggestions to avoid this problem? thank you guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RSedrati0 -
Title Tag Verses H1 Tag. Is having both the same better than different if there's only one clear winner in keyword search volume
Hi Mozzers, I am going through my categories on my eccomerce hire site trying to improve things and just wanted to check this query with you My understanding is that if I have the same H1 and title tag, then that would give more weight for that keyword phrase? Would I also be correct in assuming that the H1 is more important than the title tag or should both be treated as equals in terms of SEO. My dimemla is that for certain products we hire, there's only really one clear winner in terms of keyword phrase. The others I find in keyword planner are way down the volume list , so I have tended to put the H1 and title tag as the same and then have H2 tag and a slightly different heading. Is that the best philosphy or should I really mix them up , so the the title tag, h1, h2 are different ? Also Currently My on page content mentions the the H1 tag near the beginning of the content. Is this correct or should I really be using the H2 tag phrase near the beginning of the content. For example - One of the products we hire out is carpet cleaners. Therefore the main keyword phrase is carpet cleaner hire
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC12
and for our local pages its' carpet cleaner hire <city name="">.
This is my title tag and H1 tag and then for my h2 tag , I have something like "carpet cleaning equipment" with the content
mentioning carpet cleaner hire near the beginning.</city> I don't want to look likes its over optimization or mention the word hire to much but being a hire website, it's difficult not to and other keywords that don't mention it in it, are to varied so could increase bounce rates ?. When I look in GWT against my content keywords - the word hire shows a full bar. Just wondered what peoples thoughts are if what I am doing it okay?
thanks
Pete0 -
Why is google truncating my title tag?
We are trying to figure out why the search result for the term "au pair" is not matching our designated title tag or anything on our page. If you search "au pair", please see the result for the domain interexchange.org. We do not see this problem with other search terms.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jrjames830 -
Canonical Issue with urls
I saw some urls of my site showing duplicate page content, duplicate page title issues on crawl reports. So I have set canonical url for every urls , that has dupicate content / page title. But still SeoMoz crawl test is showing issue. I am giving here one url with issue. The below given urls shown duplicate content and duplicate page title with some other urls all are given below. Checked URL http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7635 dup page content http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 dup page Title http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 But I have set canonical url for all these urls already , that is :- http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 This should actually solve the problem right ? Search engine should identify the canonical url as original url and only should consider that. Thanks0 -
Title Tag Help
Hi everyone, So, I have some general question's about Title tags. My question's are as follows: 1. If i have a title tag like this 'Commercial bathroom instillation '. Will I show up for Commercial bathroom or Commercial bathroom instillation? The reason I ask is, i'm aiming for Commercial bathroom which has more search volume, but here is where the problem comes in. If I have Commercial bathroom instillation it is a more compelling title. Ideally i'm aiming for Commercial Bathroom, so im in a bit of a conundrum, as you can see. 2. My second question is if I have 'Bath Review and Shower review' for my title tag. Will I show up for Bath Review individually, and shower review individually, or only when someone search's that exact query? I hope that makes sense thanks. Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
How does a canonical work and is it necessary to also have a no index, follow tag in place?
Across our site, we have canonical tags in place for URLs that contain duplicate content and for URLs without a trailing slash since we are using URLs WITH a trailing slash for all URLs across our site. We also recently added a no index, follow tag to all non-canonical URLs since we noticed a high number of duplicate content URLs in Google Webmaster Tools. The first part of my question is: How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present? The second part of my question is: Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content? And lastly, if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order? Canonical tag first then no index, follow tag second or no index, follow tag first then canonical tag second? I would appreciate any insight you can give. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kbbseo0