Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Canonicalize or Block?

Technical SEO

549

yaelslater Subscriber last edited by

Hi Mozers,

We have staff profile pages w/ one main URL and then URLs with query parameters and jump links to take you to different parts of the page.

The longer URLs with parameters canonicalize to the main pages but should they also be nonidexed?

Thanks,

Yael
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
yaelslater Subscriber @Nigel_Carr last edited by

Thanks!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
yaelslater Subscriber @ThompsonPaul last edited by

Got it, thanks!!!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
Nigel_Carr last edited by

Hi Yael

I completely agree - it is pretty much what canonical tags were developed for.

Regards

Nigel
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 1
ThompsonPaul last edited by

Canonical and noindex are contradictory, Yael. It's either.or, never both. And in the case you describe, I doubt you could no-index the versions with parameters without doing it to the main URL as well (since technically they are all the same page code).

What you are describing is the classic use case for canonical tags - the exact same page referred to by multiple different URLs.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Got a burning SEO question?

Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.

Start my free trial

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Canonicalization

I understand what canonicalization does, however I'm a bit confused on one point. Generally, of course it's used to determine the main article out of two which are identical. But what happens to the keywords if the content isn't quite identical? Example:-
Let's say the 'first page' it is optimised for 'racing cycles'.
The 'second page' is optimised for 'second-hand racing cycles' Let's assume that the 'first page' doesn't have any reference to 'used' or 'second-hand' so it would be essentially unrelated to the 'second page'. If I then add an canonical tag to the 'second page' that points to the 'first page' in theory, the 'second page' will drop from the search rankings and pass any link authority back to the 'first page' What I want to know is will the 'first page', then rank for the keywords that the second page used to rank for? (in this case 'second-hand racing cycles')
Technical SEO | | seoman10

0
Google webmaster… Zopim Live chat blocking the resources

I have noticed that Zopim Live chat blocking the resources (URL’s). What are the reasons? Now I have fetched blocked urls again for indexing purpose but still I want to know the reason. Any help from experts??? yYJJ8oM.jpg
Technical SEO | | udistm

0
Blocking Affiliate Links via robots.txt

Hi, I work with a client who has a large affiliate network pointing to their domain which is a large part of their inbound marketing strategy. All of these links point to a subdomain of affiliates.example.com, which then redirects the links through a 301 redirect to the relevant target page for the link. These links have been showing up in Webmaster Tools as top linking domains and also in the latest downloaded links reports. To follow guidelines and ensure that these links aren't counted by Google for either positive or negative impact on the site, we have added a block on the robots.txt of the affiliates.example.com subdomain, blocking search engines from crawling the full subddomain. The robots.txt file is the following code: User-agent: * Disallow: / We have authenticated the subdomain with Google Webmaster Tools and made certain that Google can reach and read the robots.txt file. We know they are being blocked from reading the affiliates subdomain. However, we added this affiliates subdomain block a few weeks ago to the robots.txt, but links are still showing up in the latest downloads report as first being discovered after we added the block. It's been a few weeks already, and we want to make sure that the block was implemented properly and that these links aren't being used to negatively impact the site. Any suggestions or clarification would be helpful - if the subdomain is being blocked for the search engines, why are the search engines following the links and reporting them in the www.example.com subdomain GWMT account as latest links. And if the block is implemented properly, will the total number of links pointing to our site as reported in the links to your site section be reduced, or does this not have an impact on that figure?From a development standpoint, it's a much easier fix for us to adjust the robots.txt file than to change the affiliate linking connection from a 301 to a 302, which is why we decided to go with this option.Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated.Thanks,Mark
Technical SEO | | Mark_Ginsberg

0
How do i actually use the canonicalization rule for Apache?

Hi Guys, Moz is reporting lots of duplicate content on my site. I think this is partly from session id's and partly from category pages and on-site search generated pages. I know I have to use the canonicalization rule but don't know exactly how to determine the correct URL and where to put the code. Can anyone offer any advice on this? I'm new to this so apologies for any etiquette breaching etc. Many thanks, Stewart.
Technical SEO | | oiljob

0
Similar Websites, Same C Block: Can I Get a Penalty?

One of my website has been heavily hit by Google's entire zoo so I decided to phase it out while building a new one. Old website: www.thewebhostinghero.com
New website: www.webhostinghero.com Now the thing is that both websites are obviously similar since I kept the branding. They also both have content about the same topics. No content has been copied or spinned or whatever though. Everything's original on both websites. There were only 3 parts of both websites that were too similar in terms of functionalities so I "noindexed" it on the old website. Now it seems that Google doesn't want you to have multiple websites for the same business just for the sake of occupying more space in the search results. This can especially be detected by the websites' C block. I am not sure if this is myth or fact though. So do you think I'm in a problematic situation with this scenario? It's getting ridiculous all you have to watch for when building a website, I'm afraid to touch my keyboard in fear my websites will get penalized! Sorry for my english btw.
Technical SEO | | sbrault74

0
Blocked by robots

my client GWT has a number of notices for "blocked by meta-robots" - these are all either blog posts/categories/or tags his former seo told him this: "We've activated following settings: Use noindex for Categories Use noindex for Archives Use noindex for Tag Archives to reduce keyword stuffing & duplicate post tags
Disabling all 3 noindex settings above may remove google blocks but also will send too many similar tags, post archives/category. " is this guy correct? what would be the problem with indexing these? am i correct in thinking they should be indexed? thanks
Technical SEO | | Ezpro9

0
Canonicalization isn't consistent across site!?!

I started managing a fairly small site that consists of a home page, flash portfolio, and a wordpress blog. The home page ( main index ) is canonicalized as: The wordpress blog is canonicalized as Does canonicalization need to be consistent across the site? Could the difference in canonicalization cause any ranking problems, and or indexing problems for the blog / entire site? Any thoughts are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOProPhoto

0
Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for Filter Search result pages--Why?

Hi, We're getting 'Yellow' Search Engine Blocked by Robot Txt warnings for URLS that are in effect product search filter result pages (see link below) on our Magento ecommerce shop. Our Robot txt file to my mind is correctly set up i.e. we would not want Google to index these pages. So why does SeoMoz flag this type of page as a warning? Is there any implication for our ranking? Is there anything we need to do about this? Thanks. Here is an example url that SEOMOZ thinks that the search engines can't see. http://www.site.com/audio-books/audio-books-in-english?audiobook_genre=132 Below are the current entries for the robot.txt file. User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.php/
Disallow: /?
Disallow: /.js$
Disallow: /.css$
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /catalogsearch/
Disallow: /review/
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /downloader/
Disallow: /js/
Disallow: /lib/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /.php$
Disallow: /pkginfo/
Disallow: /report/
Disallow: /skin/
Disallow: /utm
Disallow: /var/
Disallow: /catalog/
Disallow: /customer/
Sitemap:
Technical SEO | | languedoc

0