Canonical for non-exist URL ?
-
Hi
I have a website what has parameter URL. For example
www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2
I want that search engine see my page URL as;
But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page.
If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?
-
It seems to me you're a bit confused between canonical URLs and URLs that have been rewritten. What a canonical URL does is telling the search engines what version of your URL is that canonical one, which can for example exclude some parameters. One the actual url www.example.org/special/?foo=bar&test=3 you can tell the search engines that www.example.org/special/ is your URL (and therefor the parameters foo and test will be ignored and won't create any duplicate content). But, these canonical URLs have to exist!
To create new URLs, you should either look if the CMS (Content Management System) you're using has the option to switch on static URLs (sometimes called SEF URLs). If you're using a custom system, or your CMS doesn't support static URLs, you can search google for terms such as: mod_rewrite, static urls php, htaccess url rewrite.
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
-
Urls Too Long - Should I shorten?
On the crawl of our website we have had a warning that 157 have urls that are too long. When I look at the urls they are generally from 2016 or earlier. Should I just leave them as they are or shorten the urls and redirect to new url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon4 -
Questions about canonicals
Howdy Moz community, I had a question regarding canonicals. I help a business with their SEO, and they are a service company. They have one physical location, but they serve multiple cities in the state. My question is in regards to canonicals and unique content. I hear that a page with slightly differing content for each page won't matter as much, if most of the content is relevantly the same. This business wants to create service pages for at least 10 other cities they service. The site currently only have pages that are targeting one city location. I was wondering if it was beneficial to use a template to service each city and then put a canonical there to say that it is an identical page to the main city page? Example: our first city was san francisco, we want to create city pages for santa rosa, novato, san jose and etc. If the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, city were the same content as the 1st city, but just had the slight change with the city name would that hurt? Would putting a canonical help this issue, if i alert that it is the same as the 1st page? The reason I want to do this, is because I have been getting concerns from my copywriter that after the 5th city, they can't seem to make the services pages that much different from the first 4 cities, in terms of wording of the content and its structure. I want to know is there a simpler way to target multiple cities for local SEO reasons like geo targeted terms without having to think of a completely new way to write out the same thing for each city service page, as this is very time consuming on my end. Main questions? Will making template service pages, changing the city name to target different geographic locations and putting a canonical tag for the new pages created, and referring back to the main city page going to be effective in terms of me wanting to rank for multiple cities. Will doing this tell google my content is thin or be considered a duplicate? Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Can I canonical the same page?
I have a site where I have 500+ Page listing pages and I would like to rel=canonical them to the master page. Example: http://www.example.com//articles?p=18 OR http://www.example.com/articles?p=65 I plan on adding this to the section from of the page template so it goes to all pages - When I do this, I will also add the canonical to the page I am directing the canonical. Is this a bad thing? Or allowed?
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tjhossy0 -
Are my Canonical Links set up correctly?
I have Enable Canonical Links (recommended) on my web site. However, I also have THIS checked: Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp) Is it hurting me??? Keep getting dinged on our report card. We are using the Volusion shopping cart software/platform.
Technical SEO | | GreenFarmParts0 -
Category URL Duplicate Content
I've recently been hired as the web developer for a company with an existing web site. Their web architecture includes category names in product urls, and of course we have many products in multiple categories thus generating duplicate content. According to the SEOMoz Site Crawl, we have roughly 1600 pages of duplicate content, I expect primarily from this issue. This is out of roughly 3600 pages crawled. My questions are: 1. Fixing this for the long term will obviously mean restructuring the URLs for the site. Is this worthwhile and what will the ramifications be of performing such a move? 2. How can I determine the level and extent of the effects of this duplicated content? 3. Is it possible the best course of action is to do nothing? The site has many, many other issues, and I'm not sure how highly to prioritize this problem. In addition, the IT man is highly doubtful this is causing an SEO issue, and I'm going to need to be able to back up any action I request. I do feel I will need to strongly justify any possible risks this level of site change could cause. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if any more information is needed.
Technical SEO | | MagnetsUSA0 -
Canonical Question
Our site has thousands of items, however using the old "Widgets" analogy we are unsure on how to implement the canonical tag, and if we need to at all. At the moment our main product pages lists all different "widget" products on one page, however the user can visit other sub pages that filter out the different versions of the product. I.e. glass widgets (20 products)
Technical SEO | | Corpsemerch
glass blue widgets (15 products)
glass red widgets (5 products)
etc.... I.e. plastic widgets (70 products)
plastic blue widgets (50 products)
plastic red widgets (20 products)
etc.... As the sub pages are repeating products from the main widgets page we added the canonical tag on the sub pages to refer to the main widget page. The thinking is that Google wont hit us with a penalty for duplicate content. As such the subpages shouldnt rank very well but the main page should gather any link juice from these subpages? Typically once we added the canonical tag it was coming up to the penguin update, lost a 20%-30% of our traffic and its difficult not to think it was the canonical tag dropping our subpages from the serps. Im tempted to remove the tag and return to how the site used to be repeating products on subpages.. not in a seo way but to help visitors drill down to what they want quickly. Any comments would be welcome..0 -
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
When using the On page report card I get a critical error on Rel Canonical Im not sure if I have understood this right but I think that my problem is that I own a Norwegian Domain name which is www.danske-båten.no This domain works great in norwegian, but I get problems with english (foreign) browsers. My english domain name is http://www.danske-båten.no. When you buy a domain name with the letter Å you get a non norwegian domain name as well. (dont quite get the tecnical aspect of it) Så when I publish a page (using wordpress if that means anything) I get this message: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.danske-båten.no/ferge-oslo-københavn/"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.</dd> <dd>So What to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | stlastla
</dd> </dl>0