Duplicate Content, Campaign Explorer & Rel Canonical
-
Google Advises to use Rel Canonical URL's to advise them which page with similiar information is more relevant.
You are supposed to put a rel canonical on the non-preferred pages to point back to the desired page.
How do you handle this with a product catalog using ajax, where the additional pages do not exist? An example would be:
<colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
|.com/productcategory.aspx?page=1
/productcategory.aspx?page=2
/productcategory.aspx?page=3
/productcategory.aspx?page=4
The page=1,2,3 and 4 do not physically exist, they are simply referencing additional products
I have rel canonical urls' on the main page www.examplesite.com/productcategory.aspx, but I am not 100% sure this is correct or how else it could be handled.
Any Ideas Pro mozzers?
|
-
Hoping for the extra points here, so here goes how we handled the problem.
The solution is a lot simpler than all the thought needed, or used by us to rationalize the answer, and it has been working beautifully. Our Google webmaster tools show constant improvement weekly without us doing any additional work.
We Canonicalized the first paginated results. ".com/productcategory.aspx" not ".com/productcategory.aspx?page=1" so now all pages link their juice back to the main page ".com/productcategory.aspx". GWT doesn't even care about setting the parameter "Page=" And we didn't include the Canonical tag for the product pages, because each product has its own link juice that we want to preserve, so that each product may "Star" as its own as a google result.
So all we did was to include a single canonical tag for the paginated category page and wala the hole solution works in GWT.
-
Hi Christian,
It's likely a setting in the Platinum SEO plugin related to canonical URLs. The notice from SEOmoz is just a notice letting you know they are there, and not an error.
If you have specific questions (like if your plugin and template is set up correctly), I suggest starting a new question thread and including your site's URL.
-
Hi! I have no idea what any of this means. I have "14 rel canonical urls" and I have never entered a "rel canonical url" on on any of my templates (are you talking about the css?)
I use "platinum seo" plugin and the sites that have the most of these errors seem to be the ones I'm using the "Socrates" template.
Help!
-
Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?
Thanks!
-
Damien,
I guess I was not very clear; basically I am suggesting the same thing as you in that you would use the same variable that stores the URL to pull in the canonical URL.
-
@elephantseo Would that not just point every product page to one URL if using one template?
Could you not add the canonical tag exactly the same way as you would add a unique Title or Description (that's if you have the ability for that)?
You'd have to have a database entry and when one of the particular pages loads you'd pull the desired canonical tag from the database for that 'page'.
EDIT - If you create a seperate template for each type of product then go with the template canonical URL
-
Add the rel canonical to your template so that whenever the ajax creates the new URL it already has the rel canonical pointing to the preferred page.
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
-
Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
Internal Duplicate Content - Classifieds (Panda)
I've been wondering for a while now, how Google treats internal duplicate content within classified sites. It's quite a big issue, with customers creating their ads twice.. I'd guess to avoid the price of renewing, or perhaps to put themselves back to the top of the results. Out of 10,000 pages crawled and tested, 250 (2.5%) were duplicate adverts. Similarly, in terms of the search results pages, where the site structure allows the same advert(s) to appear under several unique URLs. A prime example would be in this example. Notice, on this page we have already filtered down to 1 result, but the left hand side filters all return that same 1 advert. Using tools like Siteliner and Moz Analytics just highlights these as urgent high priority issues, but I've always been sceptical. On a large scale, would this count as Panda food in your opinion, or does Google understand the nature of classifieds is different, and treat it as such? Appreciate thoughts. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1 -
Canonical Vs No Follow for Duplicate Products
I am in the process of migrating a site from Volusion to BigCommerce. There is a limitation on the ability to display one product in 2 different ways. Here is the situation. One of the manufacturers will not allow us to display products to customers who are not logged in. We have convinced them to let us display the products with no prices. Then we created an Exclusive Contractor section that will allow users to see the price and be able to purchase the products online. Originally we were going to just direct users to call to make purchases like our competitors are doing. Because we have a large amount of purchasers online we wanted to manipulate the system to be able to allow online purchases. Since these products will have duplicates with no pricing I was thinking that Canonical tags would be kind of best practice. However, everything will be behind a firewall with a message directing people to log in. Since this will undoubtedly create a high bounce rate I feel like I need to no follow those links. This is a rather large site, over 5000 pages. The 250 no follow URLs most likely won't have a large impact on the overall performance of the site. Or so I hope anyway. My gut tells me if these products are going to technically be hidden from the searcher they should also be hidden from the engines. Does Disallowing these URLs seem like a better way to do this than simply using the Canonical tags? Any thoughts or suggestions would be really helpful!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonicaOConnor0 -
Is a Rel Canonical Sufficient or Should I 'NoIndex'
Hey everyone, I know there is literature about this, but I'm always frustrated by technical questions and prefer a direct answer or opinion. Right now, we've got recanonicals set up to deal with parameters caused by filters on our ticketing site. An example is that this: http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets?location=il&time=day relcanonicals to... http://www.charged.fm/billy-joel-tickets My question is if this is good enough to deal with the duplicate content, or if it should be de-indexed. Assuming so, is the best way to do this by using the Robots.txt? Or do you have to individually 'noindex' these pages? This site has 650k indexed pages and I'm thinking that the majority of these are caused by url parameters, and while they're all canonicaled to the proper place, I am thinking that it would be best to have these de-indexed to clean things up a bit. Thanks for any input.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keL.A.xT.o0 -
Duplicate Content For E-commerce
On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big. Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pinksgreens0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results... I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something: Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0 -
Nuanced duplicate content problem.
Hi guys, I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something. Situation: The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B. Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance. Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword. Plan: New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so... Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naymark.biz0