Do we need to use the canonical tag on non-indexed pages?

[oneresult]

Hi there

I have been working in / learning SEO for just over a year, coming from a non dev background, so there are still plenty of the finer points on-page points I am working on. Slowly building up confidence and knowledge with the great SEOMoz as a reference!

We are working on this site http://www.preciseuk.co.uk (we are still tweaking the tags and content by the way- not finished yet!)

Because a lot of the information is within accordians, a page is generated for each tab of the accordian expanded, for example:

http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php is the main page

but then you also have:

http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=0 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=1 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=2 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=3 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=4 http://www.preciseuk.co.uk/facilities-management.php?tab=5

All of which are in the same file.

According to the crawl test, these pages are not indexed.

Because it is all in one file, should we add the canonical tag to it, so that this is replicated in all the tab pages that are generated? eg.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Liz

OneResult
liz@oneresult.co.uk

[oneresult]

Ok, this may be a better option in Webmaster tools, since you need to have added robots txt or "nofollow, noindex" to the pages...which we can't do because they are all one file.

Many thanks everyone

Liz

[StalkerB]

Sounds fine. You could also go into webmaster tools as well and tell them to ignore the 'tab' parameter

Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling

Although if you're changing it to # you shouldn't need to

[oneresult]

Having talked to the guys and developers, while re-coding the whole site is not feasible for this project, we are going to prevent these pseudo pages being an issue by:

• adding a rel canonical tag to the main pages
• add the # symbol after the .php section of the code so that the search engines ignore it
• request that Google remove the few URLs that may have been indexed

[oneresult]

Yes on second thoughts the URL structure would only need to be changed if the individual tabs were meant to be different pages, it's just that the coding has split them up, as you say.

[StalkerB]

Yeah, definitely speak to the developers, see what they can do. You'll learn that SEO often requires us to box clever around what developers do

Your url structure isn't bad, it's simply that these tabs shouldn't be seperate pages at all.

[Gareth_Cartman]

Hi Barry,

Yeah I use yootheme templates for Joomla and Wordpress and they seem to use some sort of javascript to do it really well, i think its called MOOtools

[oneresult]

Thanks everyone so far, great stuff.

I did not build this site so I cannot speak for the way it was put together! I am not a developer at all but I can tell it is not the best solution.

So the best course of action seems to be, use the tag and then look into the time and costs associated with converting the URLs to a more friendly structure...

[StalkerB]

Eh, yes, you probably should.

However, why are you building your pages that way and not making the tabs javascript (or similar)?

There has to be a better way of doing it than making each it's own php file, because you're just deliberately giving yourself duplicate content issues. I'm not much of a coder though so perhaps somebody who is can wade in with an actual alternative solution.

If you really have to make it that way, then definitely use the canonical to the non-tabbed version.

[Gareth_Cartman]

I think it would be safer to add the tag, although search engines are getting more clever this way you would be making sure search engines recognise the link you want to be indexed. Hope that makes sense.