Dynamic referenced canonical pages based on IP region and link equity question
-
Hi all,
My website uses relative URLs that has PHP to read a users IP address, and update the page's referenced canonical tag to an region specific absolute URL for ranking / search results.
E.g. www.example.com/category/product - relative URL referenced for internal links / external linkbuilding
If a US IP address hits this link, the URL is the same, but canonicalisation is updated in the source to reference www.example.com**/us/**category/product, so all ranking considerations are pointed to that page instead. None of these region specific pages are actually used internally within the site.
This decision was done so external links / blog content would fit a user no matter where they were coming from.
I'm assuming this is an issue in trying to pass link equity with Googlebot, because it is splitting the strength between different absolute canonical pages depending on what IP it's using to crawl said links (as the relative URL will dynamically alter the canonical reference which is what ranking in SERPs)
Any assistance or information no matter how small would be invaluable. Thanks!
-
Either way, switching canonicals from one to another, it will do no good in terms of equity or in terms of spamminess. If you have hreflangs done, then you should be good.
-
I should of mentioned that hreflang tags are in place and working correctly with the pages for each country being indexed correctly. I'm more concerned about link equity.
-
Oh boy..
Couple words come to mind - cloaking, black hat and penalization.
By definition, a canonical link is for telling search engines what page (singular) to rank INSTEAD of a page where a canonical link is specified.
Every time crawler bot goes to your page, it says "aha, i need to rank page A instead of the one I'm on right now". So if you "change your mind" every other time crawler visits your website, search engines will just disregard your canonical tags, thinking they are broken. As for link equity - link is always pointing to 1 page, and then that equity is passed to the page, which is canonically linked. So, if you change your canonical, link equity won't be distributed between new and old canonical pages, there is no such thing as "link equity memory".
What you might wanna look into instead is hreflang links - they are telling search engines that there are different pages, created specifically for different countries/languages/regions. However, in this case, content on these pages should be different/unique, serving specific needs of users in that specific country or region.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Should I put rel next and rel prev and canonical on tags pages
Hi I have a tag pages on a news website each tag page is divided to several pages, but Google does't crawled those pages because the links are in javaScript, I want to do the following things: Change the links to html href Add rel=pref rel=next Add a canonical in each page with the url of the main tag page Do you agree with my solution? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Google Panda question Category Pages on e-commerce site
Dear Mates, Could you check this category page of our e-commerce site: http://tinyurl.com/zqjalng and give me your opinion about, this is a Panda safe page or not? Actually I have this as NOINDEX preventing any Panda hit, but I'm in doubt. My Question is "Can I index this page again in peace?" Thank you Clay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ClayRey0 -
Canonical questions
Hi, We are working on a site that sells lots of variations of a certain type of product. (Car accessories) So lets say there are 5 products but each product will need a page for each car model so we will potentially have a lot of variations/pages. As there are a lot of car models, these pages will have pretty much the same content, apart from the heading and model details. So the structure will be something like this; Product 1 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davidmaxwell
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
---BMW 1 Series (Model detail page)
---BMW 3 Series (Model detail page) Product 2 (landing page) Audi (model selection page)
---Audi A1 (Model detail page)
---Audi A2 (Model detail page)
---Audi A3 (Model detail page) BMW (model selection page)
etc
etc The structure is like this as we will be targeting each landing page for AdWords campaigns. As all of these pages could look very similar to search engines, will simply setting up each with a canonical be enough? Is there anything else we should do to ensure Google doesn't penalise for duplicate page content? Any thoughts or suggestions most welcome.
Thanks!0 -
Interlinking vs. 'orphaning' mobile page versions in a dynamic serving scenario
Hi there, I'd love to get the Moz community's take on this. We are working on setting up dynamic serving for mobile versions of our pages. During the process of planning the mobile version of a page, we identified a type of navigational links that, while useful enough for desktop visitors, we feel would not be as useful to mobile visitors. We would like to remove these from our mobile version of the page as part of offering a more streamlined mobile page. So we feel that we're making a fine decision with user experience in mind. On any single page, the number of links removed in the mobile version would be relatively few. The question is: is there any danger in “orphaning” the mobile versions of certain pages because links don’t exist pointing to those pages on our mobile pages? Is this a legitimate concern, or is it enough that none of the desktop versions of pages are orphaned? We were not sure whether it’s even possible, in Googlebot’s eyes, to orphan a mobile version of a page if we use dynamic serving and if there are no orphaned desktop versions of our pages. (We also plan to link to "full site" in the footer.) Thank you in advance for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R
Eric0 -
Ecommerce Link Juice and Canonical URLs
Hello all. I am optimising an E-Commerce site and I have a questions about Products in several categories & Canonical URL's. Using Magento Platform. site.com/category1/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear
site.com/category2/product1/ ( link from category is site.com/product1/ )
site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( link from category is the same , as is the canonical URL )
site.com/product1/ ( this is where other categories link to ) Canonical links for all the above is site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 which takes care of duplicate content correctly. I just wonder if we would get more link juice if ALL the links from all categories went to site.com/category2/subcategory1/product1 ( instead of some going to site.com/product1/ ) Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
Link Building for "State" informational pages
I have a webpage for all 50 states for specific info relating to relocation and was wondering if there are any recommended links to work at getting for these pages. I would like to do "state" specific and possibly health related links for each page to help in the SEO rankings. I can see that if I just wanted to get 10 links on each page that is going to be 500 links I have to build and it is going to be very time consuming but I feel it is necessary. Thank you, Poo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
Can obfuscated Javascript be used for too many links on a page?
Hi mozzers Just looking for opinions/answers on if it is ever appropriate to use obfuscated Javascript on links when a page has many links but they need to be there for usability? It seems grey/black hat to me as it shows users something different to Google (alarm bells are sounding already!) BUT if the page has many links it's losing juice which could be saved....... Any thoughts appreciated, thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrevorJones0 -
Advanced Question on Synonym Variation Pages!
Hi, This is quite an advanced question, so I'll go through in detail - please bare with me! I launched the new version of our website exactly a week ago - and all the key metrics are in the right direction: Pages / Visit +5% , Time on Site +25%, Bounce rate down 1 %. I work in an industry were our primary keyword has 4 synonyms and our long tail keywords are location related. So as an example I have primary synonyms like: Holiday, Vacation, Break, Trip (Not actually these but they are good enough as an example). Pluralised versions and you have 8 in total. So my longtail keywords are like: Las Vegas Vacation / Las Vegas Vacations
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
Las Vegas Holiday / Las Vegas Holidays
Las Vegas Trip / Las Vegas Trips
Las Vegas Breaks / Las vegas Breaks All these synonyms effectively mean the same thing, so my thinking on my new website was to specifically target each of these synonyms with their own unique page and optimise the meta and page titles, to those exact words. To make these pages truely unique, I therefore got a bunch of copywriters to write about 600 words unique for every long tail synonym (well over 750,000 words in total!). So now at this point I have my page "Las Vegas Holidays" with 600 unique words of content, and "Las Vegas Vactions" with 600 words of unique content etc etc etc. The problem is, when the user is searching for these words, there primary goal is not to read 600 words of content on "Las Vegas Holidays" - their primary goal is to get a list of last vegas holidays that they can search, view purchase (they may want to read 600 words of content, but is not their primary goal). So this puts me in a dilema - I need to display the nuts and bolt (IE the actual holidays in las vegas) to the customer on any page they land on off my synonyms as the primary content. But to make sure these pages are unique I need to also have this unique content on that page. So here's what I did: On every synonym version of the page I display the exact same information. However, on each page I have a "Information" link. and on click this pop's up a layer which contains my unique content for that page. To further optimise using perfect anchors in this content pop-up, I have cross linked the synonym pages (totally naturally) - IE on my "Las Vegas Holidays" page, in the content I may have the words "Las Vegas Breaks" - this would be linked the the "Las Vegas Breaks" synonym page. In theory I don't think there is anything wrong with what I am doing in the eyes of the customer - but I have a big concern that this may well look "fishy" to SE's. IE the pages are almost identical to the user except for this information pop-up layer of unique content, titles and meta. We know that Google at least can get can tell exactly what the user see's when they land on that page ( from their "Preview") and can distinguise between user visible and hidden text. Therefore, even though from a user experience, I think we are making a page that is perfect for them (they get the list of vactions etc as the primary content, and can read infomation if they want by clicking a button), I am concerned that SE's are going to say - hold on a minute there are load of pages here that are identical except for a chuck of text that is not visible to the user (Even though this is visible to the user if they click the "Information" button), and this content cross links to a load of almost identical pages with the same thing. Today I checked our rankings, and we have taken a fair whack from google - I'm not overly concerned at the moment as I expected big fluctuations from ranking for the first few weeks - but I'd be a lot more confident if they were fluctuating in the right direction!! So what do I do?
As far as I can see my options break down as follows: Content Display:
1/. Keep it as it is, and hope the SE's don't see it as spammy. Even though I think what we are doing is the best for customer experience, I'm concerned SE's won't. 2/. On every synonym page, below all the list of products, packages etc that the customer wants to see, display the unique content as a block of subtext text which is visble by default. This however could make the page a bit ugly. 3/. Display a visible snippet of the unique content, below all the packages, and have a more button which expands the rest of the content - IE have a part visible layer. This is slightly better for display, but again I'm only displaying a portion of visible content and the rest will still be flagged as "hidden" by default to the SE's. Cross Linking within the content:
1/. Keep it as it is where synonym keywords link to the synonym version of the page. 2/. Alter it so that every sysnonym keyword links to the "primary" synonym version of the page - EG if I now "Las Vegas Holidays" is my main keyword, then "Las Vegas Vactions" keyword, would not link to my "Las Vegas Vactions" page as current, but would link to my "Las Vegas Holidays" page. I apologise for the indepth questions, but it requires a lot of explanation to get it across clearly. I would be grateful on any of your thoughts. Many thanks in advance.0