Please take a look at my canonical tag - is it written right?
-
Hi there! I just changed the preferred domain settings from http://example.com to http://www.example.com and received a recommended action from Google: "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps."
Could you please let me know if "the new host" is equal to "canonical" and if I have to include this tag into every page of my website ?
Thank you!
-
Thank you!
-
Unfortunately I'm not much of a coder, so I won't be able to guide you on the htaccess code piece. Regarding the Search Console items though, the tool treats every site that is setup as its own entity, which is why you need a country and XML for each. An example of why they do this because you might have different profiles for http://www.example.com/us and http://www.example.com/ca where the subfolder specifies the country. If they recycled the same info from each profile setup, the /ca site would be set to U.S. instead of Canada.
-
Thank you, Sean!
-
Logan,
Thank you very much for your advise! I figured out that it is going to be much of work going from page to page and set their canonicals:) Maybe updating my .htaccess will work out? I am wondering if that (please see below) would be the right thing to put in there?
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^example.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [r=301,nc]Also, when I added the property (http://www.example.com) yesterday and set it as preferred domain, I was suggested to change the target country and submit a sitemap file for both http://example.com and http://www.example.com. I don't quite understand why do they want me to do that if the country and the sitemap are obviously the same?
-
Kirupa,
The syntax of your canonical tag is correct. However, there are a couple things you should know before you continue:
1- When Google says "Ensure that you specify the new host as canonical in all page links or sitemaps." it means they want to to update internal links and your XML sitemaps, so it's more involved than simply updating your canonical tag. Basically anywhere your URLs are referenced should be updated to reflect your new www-canonical URL structure.
2- You may have provided that one tag as an example, but DO NOT put that exact tag on every page of your site. Doing so would point search engines to the homepage of your site from any page they visit. Canonical tags are basically soft redirects that search engines follow, so when a bot sees a canonical tag on one page that points to another page, they leave and go to where the canonical is pointing them. Google will often de-index URLs that canonicalize to another URL, which I'm assuming you don't want
-
Hey Kirupa,
Short answer is that you're all good. The canonical is correct.
All the best,
Sean
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
-
Why do two pages compete while a canonical tag is active?
Hi guys, My SERP analysis show me that two pages compete eachother for the keyword kinderfiets, which should not happen since there is a canonical tag is active. www.halfords.nl/fiets/kinderfiets/kinderfiets/ Ranks #6 and www.halfords.nl/fiets/kinderfiets/ Ranks #7. The first one is a subcategory which is one step deeper than the second one. I prefer consumers to land on the broader subcategory, because that one shows more products.Furthermore, we already did some SEO tweaking for the #7 page, but did not work on the #6 page. So it is even kind of strange that this page ranks higher.Can somebody help me out?Kind Regards,Tom
Technical SEO | | Sebastiaan10 -
Non-standard HTML tags in content
I had coded my website's article content with a non-standard tag <cnt>that surrounded other standard tags that contained the article content, I.e.</cnt> , . The whole text was enclosed in a div that used Schema.org markup to identify the contents of the div as the articleBody. When looking at scraped data for stories in Webmaster Tools, the content of the story was there and identified as the articleBody correctly. It's recently been suggested by someone else that the presence of the non-standard <cnt>tags were actually making the content of the article uncrawlable by the Googlebot, this effectively rendering the content invisible. I did not believe this to be true, since the content appeared to be correctly indexed in Webmaster Tools, but for the sake of a test I agreed to removing them. In the last 6 weeks since they were removed, there have been no changes in impressions or traffic from organic search, which leads me to believe that the removal of the <cnt>tags actually had no effect, since the content was already being indexed successfully and nothing else has changed.</cnt></cnt> My question is whether or not an encapsulating non-standard tag as I've described would actually make the content invisible to Googlebot, or if it should not have made any difference so long as the correct Schema.org markup was in place? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | dlindsey0 -
Large Companies Taking Over Rankings
Recently many large companies. (lowes, bed bath and beyond, walmart, target, ace hardware, etc.), have taken over the rankings of keywords we used to rank high in. Is there any way to improve our rankings and compete with these large companies? Is this due to recent Google changes? Sample keywords are: electrolux vacuum bags, oreck vacuum bags, vacuum cleaner bag, vacuum cleaner filter
Technical SEO | | totalvac0 -
• symbol in title tag
We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•" Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees • Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes
Technical SEO | | lighttable0 -
Block /tag/ or not?
I've asked this question in another area but now i want to ask it as a bigger question. Do we block /tag/ with robots.txt or not. Here's why I ask: My wordpress site does not block /tag/ and I have many /tag/ results in the top 10 results of Google. Have for months. The question is, does Google see /tag/ on WordPress as duplicate content? SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say. I'm all for optimizing my site but Google is not penalizing me for /tag/ results. I don't want to block /tag/ if Google is not seeing it as duplicate content for only one reason and that's because I have many results in the top 10 on G. So, can someone who knows more about this weigh in on the subject for I really would like a accurate answer. Thanks in advance...
Technical SEO | | MyAllenMedia0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Geotargeting duplicate content to different regions - href and canonical tag confusion
If you duplicate content onto a sub-folder for say a new US geotargeted site (to target kw spelling differences) and, in addition to GWT geotargeting settings, implement the 'Canonical' and 'Hreflang' tags on these new pages to show G different region and language version (en-us). Then does the original/main site similar pages also need to have canonical and href tags ? The main/original sites page I don't really want to target a specific country (although existing signals (hosting etc) will be UK (primary target of main site) but pages show up in other country searches too (which we want). Im presuming fine to leave the original/main site as it currently is although wording in google blog/webmaster central articles etc are a bit confusing hence why im asking for anyone elses opinion/input on this. Also is there are any benefit (or just best practice) to use 'www.example.com/en-us/...' in the subdirectory URL as opposed to just 'www.example.com/us/' many thanks in advance to any commentators 🙂
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0