Canonical Chain
-
This is quite advanced so maybe Rand can give me an answer?
I often have seen questions surrounding a 301 chain where only 85% of the link juice is passed on to the first target and 85% of that to the next one, up to three targets. But how about a canonical chain?
What do I mean by this:?
I have a client who sells lighting so I will use a real example (sans domain)
I don't want 'new-product' pages appearing in SERPS. They dilute link equity for the categories they replicate and often contain identical products to the main categories and subcategories. I don't want to no index them all together I'd rather tell Google they are the same as the higher category/sub category. (discussion whether a noindex/follow tag would be better?)
If I canonicalize
new-products/ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 to
/ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17/kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217
I then subsequently discover that everything in kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217 is already in /kitchen-lighting-c17 and I decide to canonicalize those two - so I place a /kitchen-lighting-c17 canonical on /kitchen-ceiling-lights-c217. Then what happens to the new-products canonical?
Is it the same rule - does it pass 85% of link equity back to the non new-product URL and 85% of that back to the category? does it just not work? or should I do noindexi/follow
Now before you jump in:
Let's assume these are done over a period of time because the obvious answer is:
Canonicalize both back to /ceiling-lights-c1/kitchen-lighting-c17
I know that and that is not what I am asking.
What if they are done in a sequence what is the real result?
I don't want to patronise anyone but please read this carefully before giving an answer.
Regards
Nigel
Carousel Projects.
-
Anyone have any more thoughts on this please?
-
OK, thanks for that - I'm still a bit cynical about that amd am pretty sure that doesn't go for a redirect chain but: The reason I asked for the person answering to read the question properly was so that I wouldn't get half an answer
please could someone read it all the way through and give me their thoughts?
Thanks.
-
Full link juice is now passed through redirects. Google stopped dinging the value of links that pass through a redirect about a year ago. More info here....
http://searchengineland.com/google-no-pagerank-dilution-using-301-302-30x-redirects-anymore-254608
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
-
Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?
Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but 301 re-direct to the preferred URL. Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lunavista-comm0 -
Can you canonical your homepage to a different URL on the same domain?
I would like to know if it is acceptable (or even possible from Google's standpoint) to canonical your homepage to a different URL on the same domain? For example, my homepage is www.grasscare.com (it's not) and I've built links to that page for years for terms like "grass seed" and "buy grass seed" because all I sold in the past was grass seed. If I then decide I want to sell both grass seed and sod, can I canonical my homepage (grasscare.com) to a new URL www.grasscare.com/grasss-seed.html to preserve the link value I've built up for "grass seed"?The new homepage would turn into a doorway page of sorts, forcing users to select either grass seed or sod before going further. Whatever content there is on the new homepage about grass seed would also be present on grasscare.com/grass-seed.html, though it would only be a small amount of content. Can a canonical be used to point the homepage to this new page and also, will this canonical pass all of the link value and ranking signals it help in the past to the new URL? Thank you in advance for any help or insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
301 and Canonical - is using both counterproductive
A site lost a great deal of traffic in July, which appears to be from an algorithmic penalty, and hasn't recovered yet. It appears several updates were made to their system just before the drop in organic results. One of the issues noticed was that both uppercase and lowercase urls existed. Example urls are: www.domain.com/product123
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ABK717
www.domain.com/Product123 To clean this up, a 301 redirect was implemented a few months ago. Another issue found was that many product related urls had a parameter added to the url for a tracking purpose. To clean this up, the tracking parameters were removed from the system and a canonical tag was implemented as these pages were also found in Google's index. The tag forced a page such as www.domain.com/product123?ref=topnav to be picked up as www.domain.com/product123. So now, there is a 301 to address the upper and lowercase urls and a canonical tag to address the parameters from creating more unnecessary urls. A few questions here: -Is this redunant and can cause confusion to the serps to have both a canonical and 301 redirect on the same page? -Both the 301 and canonical tag were implemented several months ago, yet Google's index is still showing them. Do these have to be manually removed with GWT individually since they are not in a subfolder or directory? Looking forward to your opinions.0 -
Robots.txt Blocked Most Site URLs Because of Canonical
Had a bit of a "Gotcha" in Magento. We had Yoast Canonical Links extension which worked well , but then we installed Mageworx SEO Suite.. which broke Canonical Links. Unfortunately it started putting www.mysite.com/catalog/product/view/id/516/ as the Canonical Link - and all URLs with /catalog/productview/* is blocked in Robots.txt So unfortunately We told Google that the correct page is also a blocked page. they haven't been removed as far as I can see but traffic has certainly dropped. We have also , at the same time had some Site changes grouping some pages & having 301 redirects. Resubmitted site map & did a fetch as google. Any other ideas? And Idea how long it will take to become unblocked?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"?
Hi mozzers, I would like to know What is the difference between link rel="canonical" and meta name="canonical"? and is it dangerous to have both of these elements combined together? One of my client's page has the these two elements and kind of bothers me because I only know link rel="canonical" to be relevant to remove duplicates. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Canonical tag
Hi all, I have an ecommerce client and on the pages they have a drop down so customers can view via price, list etc. Natrurally I want a canonical tag on these pages, here's the question. as they have different pages of products, the canonical tag on http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7/?sort=price_asc,searchterm=,layout=grid,page=1 is to http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7. now, because the page=7 is a duplicate of the main page, shouldn't the canonical just be to the main page rather than page=7? Even when there is a canonical tag on the /Christmas/page=7 to the /Christmas page? hope that makes sense to everyone!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarlBantleman0 -
Alternative to rel canonical?
Hello there, we have a problem. Let's say we have a website www.mainwebsite.com Then you have 40 websites like this: www.retailer1.mainwebsite.com www.retailer2.mainwebsite.com www.retailer3.mainwebsite.com www.retailer4.mainwebsite.com www.retailer5.mainwebsite.com www.retailer6.mainwebsite.com … an so on In order to avoid the duplicate content penalty from Google we've added a rel="canonical" in each 40 sub-websites mapping each page of them to www.mainwebsite.com Our issue is that now, all our retailers (each owner of www.retailer-X.mainwebsite.com) are complaining about the fact that they are disappeared from Google. How can we avoid to use rel="canonical" in the sub-website and not being penalised by Google for duplicate content in www.mainwebsite.com? Many thanks, all your advices are much appreciated. YESdesign team
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0