Rel=canonical on landing page question
-
Currently we have two versions of a category page on our site (listed below)
Version A: www.example.com/category
• lives only in the SERPS but does not live on our site navigation
• has links
• user experience is not the best
Version B: www.example.com/category?view=all
• lives in our site navigation
• has a rel=canonical to version A
• very few links and doesn’t appear in the SERPS
• user experience is better than version A
Because the user experience of version B is better than version A I want to take out the rel=canonical in version B to version A and instead put a rel=canonical to version B in version A. If I do this will version B show up in the SERPS eventually and replace version A? If so, how long do you think this would take? Will this essentially pass page rank from version A to version B
-
Hi there
Alot of this sounds off to me. First, I'd think you'd want /category living in the navigation, be indexed, have links, and have a great user experience.
In my mind, www.example.com/category?view=all should only exist as a filtering URL when you change the number of URLs you want to see on the page itself.
You'll have substantially more luck focusing on version A in my opinion. Focus on creating a great user experience and optimization strategy, and you should reap the benefits at a deeper level.
Let me know if this helps! Good luck!
Patrick
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
-
Rel="canonical" in hyperlink
Inside my website, I use the rel = "canonical" but I do not use it in the but in a hyperlink. Now it is not clear to me if that goes well. See namely different stories about the Internet. My example below link: Bruiloft
Technical SEO | | NECAnGeL0 -
How to make my good sub-page rank ahead of my generic home page?
I have an ecommerce site for the clothes drying racks my family business makes, and it sells a few other laundry items also. It's about 5 years old. We used to rank on the first page for basic phrases like "clothes drying rack" and "umbrella clothesline". About 1.5 years ago we fell hard in the rankings. Since then "umbrella clothesline" has moved back to the first page, but "clothes drying rack" is stuck on the 3rd page and always with the result being the generic homepage instead of the good sub-page (which used to rank on the first page) that really shows-n-tells about our drying rack. Here are the three pages I am talking about. Home page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/ Drying rack page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/clothes-drying-rack-main.html and umbrella clothesline page = http://www.bestdryingrack.com/umbrella-clotheslines.html Any ideas on how to get the drying rack page to start ranking well again? (hopefully better than the generic homepage ranks) A little technical background: the Moz campaign on this site says that the home page has a PA = 42 with 190 LRD's and 344 external links. Both the umbrella clothesline page and the clothes drying rack page have almost equal statistics of PA = 35 with 20 LRD's and 23 external links. My anchor text distribution is maybe unbalanced. The drying rack page has 15 external links with the anchor of "Clothes Drying Rack". But the umbrella clothesline page has 14 external links with the anchor of "outdoor umbrella clothesline" and it ranks on the first page for that search. I can't figure out how to get OSE to tell me anchor text stats for just the homepage and not the whole site since www.bestdryingrack.com/index.html 301's to the plain www.bestdryingrack.com (if you know how, please share) What's wrong with my poor neglected clothes drying rack page? The only way I can get it to show up on the first page is to do a real specific search like "round wooden clothes drying rack" Your help could save a faltering family business. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Detail page popup questions for real estate client
My client, discoverstl.com, recently changed their site structure so that the detail page for individual property opens as a popup within the main page they are visiting, see http://d.pr/i/e8ik after clicking view details on the featured property on the home page. While the url links out to a properly formatting detail page, such as VIEW DETAILS, the developer says this doesn't affect google as its a javascript tweak that pulls it into the existing page. I'm still not convinced and am looking if this is bad for our SEO campaign. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | insitegoogle0 -
SEO question: Need help on rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Hi all, we have webcontent in 3 languages (official belgian yellow pages), we use a separate domain per language, these are also our brands.
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories
ex. for the restaurant Wagamamahttp://www.goudengids.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to nl-be
http://www.pagesdor.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to fr-be
http://www.pagesdor.be/wagamama-antwerpen-2018/ corresponds to en-be The trouble is that sometimes I see the incorrect urls appearing when doing a search in google, ex. when searching on google.be (dutch=nederlands=nl-be) I see the www.pagesdor.be version appearing (french) I was trying to find a fix for this within https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=nl , but this only seems to apply to websites which use SUBdomains for language purposes. I'm not sure if can work for DOMAINS. Can anyone help me out? Kind regards0 -
Does google like Category pages or pages with lots of Products on them?
We are having an issue with getting Google to rank the page we want. To have this page http://www.jakewilson.com/c/52/-/346/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires rank for the key word Cruiser Motorcycle Tires; however, this page http://www.jakewilson.com/t/52/-/343/752/Cruiser-Motorcycle-Tires is ranking instead and it has less links and page authority according to site explorer and it is farther down in the hierarchy. I am wondering if google just likes pages that have actual products on them instead of a page leading to the page with all the products. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | DoRM0 -
Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
Hello, 7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed. Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters? I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | yacpro130 -
What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?
I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy. However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words. I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | NoahsDad0 -
Querystring params, rel canonical and SEO
I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params. There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO? If so, by how much? Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.
Technical SEO | | NicB10