Canonicals Passing Link Juice?
-
After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation.
We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone. No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google. But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all.
A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users.
We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google. We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers. I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles. People can comment there as well if they like.
Are there any potential downsides to doing this? My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings.
Thank you.
-
A Canonical is kind of like a Bots-Only 301 redirect. So, from a purely mechanical perspective, using a canonical can pass link equity to your other page without redirecting Users off of the forum thread. Now, this would be a deceptive use of the Rel=canonical tag and the bots would stop respecting it on those pages. Since a canonical is a suggestion, not a directive, if the bots think that your canonical is improper, deceptive, incorrect, etc. then they can just stop following it. Ultimately, using a canonical tag in the manner you're thinking wouldn't work out the way you would want it to. You might be able to pass equity from the one page to the other for a time... but that would not be a proper or best practices use of the tag and it would not have long term effects.
You'd be better served by looking at updating/expanding your content, internal linking, and backlink profile. And take a look at the article that Andy linked to in his response.
-
Hi,
I really wouldn't do that as the page match doesn't fit, Canonical similar pages only.
However, internal linking can help create strong 'hub' pages on a site and this is a great way to top up your homepage without getting into any form of redirection.
The best thing I can suggest is have a read of this article to understand how it works, how to do it, and what you can expect, but essentially, it is all about creating string text anchor links to your homepage. That's the short version
On top of this, just make sure you are doing the very best possible job on your homepage. Do a page audit to see what is working for you and what you might need to be updating.
-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
-
New link explorer
I was checking this new tool which is really cool by the way and was wondering if I can outrank big guys with just content. I have a Domain authority of 28 with a spam score of 28 % Can I outrank with amazing content a site that hase a domain authority of 50 and a spam score of 1 % ? Should I ask for all my bad links to be removed so that my spam score goes down or doesn't it matter anymore those days and what matters is good content, link just don't count anymore ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F800 -
Spammy Inbound Links
Hello, We have been using Zendesk to manage our customer support tickets for approx 2 years. We recently noticed that the attached forum had lot's of spam comments attached to it. Promoting Viagra and the like. The system was installed as a subdomain of my site support.mysite.com We have since deleted our account with Zendesk but Moz and Google are reporting loads of inbound links to that subdomain that are all total spam with Viagra in the anchor text etc. The subdomain no longer exists and now throws a 404. Can these links still hurt me? Is there other steps I need to take? I have disavowed all the links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | niallfred0 -
Attribution of port number to canonical links...ok?
Hi all A query has recently been raised internally with regard to the use of canonical links. Due to CMS limitations with a client who's CMS is managed by a third party agency, canonical links are currently output with the port number attributed, e.g. example.com/page:80 ...as opposed to the correct absolute URL: example.com/page Note port number are not attributed to the actual page URLs. We have been advised that this canonical link functionality cannot be amended at present. My personal interpretation of canonical link requirements is that such a link should exactly match the absolute URL of the intended destination page, my query is does this extend to the attribution of port number to URLs. Is the likely impact of the inclusion of such potentially incorrect URLs likely to be the same as purely incorrect canonical links. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 26ryan0 -
How to minimalise links in your footer
Hi guys, I'm working on the website to improve the internal linking structure. We have thousand of pages, and on every single page we have the same footer with the same links. For this reason I would like to change the footer in only relevant links for the user, but also for the robots. So for the user I leave in the general main links Home / Contact / Promotions and customise a part of the links to specific links about the section they are looking at. Now my idea was to add to the General Main links a Nofollow, so I direct the robots in a better structure about how to read the website. I have been reading a lot about internal linkbuilding- like http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link http://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-rocket-science-simplified/22503/ and a lot more, too much to display all. but my question would be, is it smart to internally start using NOFOLLOW's on links. because I do found also some negative comments on this approach http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/noindex-nofollow-canonical-and-disallow I hope to get some feedback from the community to make up my mind.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Letty0 -
Canonical Problems
Hi Guys, There is so much info out there about canonical issues and 301 redirects I'm not sure what to do about my problem. Google webmaster says I have over 2000 duplicate page titles. Google is showing most of my pages in duplicate or triplicate url format. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fasctimseo
/store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE//store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE/store/love_oil_caribbean_rose/Im using x-cart pro as my cart.When I look at the source code I see each one having a rel=canonical tag with the exact urls you see above. Can someone give me an example of a redirect that I can put in my .htaccess file that would work site wide?I obviously cant go through and 301 this on a page by page basis. It would take a year.Thank You Tim
0 -
Need to migrate multiple URLs and trying to save link juice
I have an interesting problem SEOmozers and wanted to see if I could get some good ideas as to what I should to for the greatest benefit. I have an ecommerce website that sells tire sensors. We just converted the old site to a new platform and payment processor, so the site has changed completely from the original, just offering virtually the same products as before. You can find it at www.tire-sensors.com We're ranked #1 for the keyword "tire sensors" in Google. We sell sensors for ford, honda, toyota, etc -- and tire-sensors.com has all of those listed. Before I came along, the company I'm working for also had individual "mini ecommerce" sites created with only 1 brand of sensors and the URL to match that maker. Example : www.fordtiresensors.com is our site, only sells the Ford parts from our main site, and ranks #1 in Google for "ford tire sensors" I don't have analytics on these old sites but Google Keyword Tool is saying "ford tire sensors" gets 880 local searches a month, and other brand-specific tire sensors are receiving traffic as well. We have many other sites that are doing the same thing. www.suzukitiresensors.com (ranked #2 for "suzuki tire sensors") Only sells our Suzuki collection from the main site's inventory etc We need to get rid of the old sites because we want to shut down the payment gateway and various other things those sites are using, and move to one consolidated system (aka www.tire-sensors.com) Would simply making each maker-specific URL (ie. fordtiresensors.com) 301 redirect to our main site (www.tire-sensors.com) give us to most benefit, rankings, traffic etc? Or would that be detrimental to what we're trying to do -- capturing the tire sensors market for all car manufacturers? Suggestions? Thanks a lot in advance! Jordan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanGodbey0