Canonical and Alternate Advice
-
At the moment for most of our sites, we have both a desktop and mobile version of our sites. They both show the same content and use the same URL structure as each other. The server determines whether if you're visiting from either device and displays the relevant version of the site.
We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph.
Would the way of us doing it at the moment be correct?
-
That would normally be the case but not tonight.
LOL, I am picking up a lot of the UK Q&A I will be at BrightonSEO and search love London if any of you guys will be in the area I'd love to grab a pint?
sincerely,
Thomas
-
The reason we answered 'quickly' by the way is because we are in the UK - you were still in bed lol!
-
There is only ONE URL that is the point.
If they share the same URL then you only have one page of code so ONE canonical
Regards
Nigel
-
Sorry Nigel
was not trying to make this more complicated was just trying to make sure that we were all on the same page.
FYI if you need a method of adding the rel canonical to your website quickly you can use Google tag manager or if you want to add to the header
https://support.stackpath.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001445283-EdgeRules-Adding-a-Canonical-Header
-
So a self referencing canonical on both mobile and desktop versions of the site, regardless if they chuck out two version with the same content?
-
Hi JH
I'm sure Thomas means well with his multiple complicated posts but all of this is totally unnecessary.
Both sites are serving the same URL
You can't put a rel=alternative because there is nothing to point to.
Just put a self-referencing canonical. I said that 2 hours ago!
That is all.
Regards Nigel
-
Use a self-referencing canonical
https://blog.seoprofiler.com/google-recommend-self-referencing-canonical-tags/
Please let me know if you want me to remove the image below?
you can use this one if needed http://bseo.io/c1vMSv
-
I've been told to pass on a URL, thanks for your help Thomas!
-
Hey man I understand is a big deal
could you do me a huge favor and run your site through screaming frog SEO spider send me a couple of pages with the domains whited out so I can tell you 100% what to do in this situation because I am basing this on what you have told me and honestly I would like to look at what a tool can show me and that will tell me what I need to do.
Or you can tell me if the mobile version of the site hit's Google's index yes or no?
respectfully,
Tom
-
So both mobile and desktop require a self referencing canonical(in both headers)?
Sorry for the questions, just need to make sure! It's a very touchy subject!
-
The single self-referencing URL will work.
-
What URLs are you using with the “alternate” tag on?
You said
”1. We have multiple brand sites, that have a similar setup. They all have mobile and desktop versions of the sites running on the same URL, both of which show the same content.2. The server determines whether if you're on a desktop or mobile devices using the header information, and points the user to the site relevant files for the given device.”
thats Dynamic serving same URL
Dynamic serving is a setup where the server responds with different HTML (and CSS) on the same URL depending on which user agent requests the page (mobile, tablet, or desktop).
that would NOT give you the mobile or m.example.com & www.example.com different URLs
**But If you do have a different m.example.com & www.example.com URLs you should use this code or XML site maps **
for different URLs use this:
Annotations in the HTML
On the desktop page (http://www.example.com/page-1), add the following annotation:
<linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only>
On the mobile page (http://m.example.com/page-1), the required annotation should be:
<linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:>
This rel="canonical" tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.
Or
Annotations in sitemaps
We support including the rel="alternate"annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:
<urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<="" span="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc>
<xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<="" span="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></urlsetxmlns="http:>You should have the same URL on mobile and desktop
You should have the same rel canonical tag on your URLs unless and this is a big unless you're talking about using Google AMP?
If the URL you want to be indexed is the same URL point everything to that URL if that makes it easier to understand.
respectfully,
Tom
-
Just to confirm, are we suppose to have a canonical on desktop and mobile or just desktop?
This would mean removing the alternate?
Want to confirm everything before iterating this across to others.
We are not using AMP, just a standard site setup.
-
Unless you are using AMP?
Then you would add
Linking pages with
In order to solve this problem, we add information about the AMP page to the non-AMP page and vice versa, in the form of tags in the .
Add the following to the non-AMP page:
<link rel="amphtml" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/amp/document.html">
And this to the AMP page:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url/to/full/document.html">
are you using AMP pages?
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/discovery
I hope that helps you if not please let me know.
Respectfully,
Tom
-
Cool, that's what I thought when I heard your description I just wanted to be very thorough because sometimes you get very little information and I appreciate you letting me know that.
dynamic serving URLs are identical to each other so you should have a self-referencing canonical tag because the URL does not change the real canonical tag just decides what should be in the index and the same URL.
You're Rel canonical should be something like this example below
Example URL https://www.example.com/example-url/
because the end URL is the same and URL that you want to be indexed in Google you want to be certain that you have a self-referencing URL to prevent query strings and other things like that and you do not need to point a URL to an identical URL you just need a self-referencing canonical if that makes sense.
See: https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/
I hope that is of help,
Tom
-
Hi,
I can't give off too much information as it's not my call, but I can answer your questions without mentioning the brands.
1. We have multiple brand sites, that have a similar setup. They all have mobile and desktop versions of the sites running on the same URL, both of which show the same content.
2. The server determines whether if you're on a desktop or mobile devices using the header information, and points the user to the site relevant files for the given device.
3. Our sites would quite clearly fit in the dynamic serving category.
We have 301 redirects on none www to www and http to https.
-
This is the correct solution!
-
The URLs are identical it is just the content that is served that may be slightly different.
Since you can only specify one canonical for each URL it makes no difference. Just self-reference and that is it.
If you had to different URLs then it would be an issue where you woudl need a rel=alternative so there is nothing to worry about.
Regards
Nigel
-
You guys are fast I was going to answer this and had to do some other things but let me weigh in on couple things.
as you said
“We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags**. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph.”**
so what you’re saying is that you have a dynamic site so you don’t need to add “alternate"media” tags to the site.
https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving
As it is not immediately apparent in this setup that the site alters the HTML for mobile user agents (the mobile content is "hidden" when crawled with a desktop user agent), it’s recommend that the server send a hint to request that Googlebot for smartphones also crawl the page, and thus discover the mobile content. This hint is implemented using the Vary HTTP header.
**you don’t need this **
Annotations in the HTML
On the desktop page (
http://www.example.com/page-1
), add the following annotation:<code dir="ltr"><linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only></code>
On the mobile page (
http://m.example.com/page-1
), the required annotation should be:<code dir="ltr"><linkrel="canonical"href="http: www.example.com="" page-1"=""></linkrel="canonical"href="http:></code>
This
rel="canonical"
tag on the mobile URL pointing to the desktop page is required.Annotations in sitemaps
We support including the
rel="alternate"
annotation for the desktop pages in sitemaps like this:<code dir="ltr"><urlsetxmlns="http: www.sitemaps.org="" schemas="" sitemap="" 0.9"<br="">xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <url><loc>http://www.example.com/page-1/</loc> <xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)"<br="">href="http://m.example.com/page-1"/></xhtml:linkrel="alternate"media="only></url></urlsetxmlns="http:></code>
The required
rel="canonical"
tag on the mobile URL should still be added to the mobile page's HTML.**to be sure **
Are you willing to share your domain with us? Or one domain?
-
We're talking about multiple websites that all have the identical site structure or at least mobile and desktop site structure?
-
Your server is making the change for you?
-
Would you be kind enough to install this plug-in on chrome in order for you to show a couple examples of the canonical and the URL?
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/portents-seo-page-review/babgchcegnkbiojmdpnoilficladccfm?hl=en-US
- https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-redirect-trace/nnpljppamoaalgkieeciijbcccohlpoh?hl=en
In addition, would you be kind enough to run your site through the two tools here ( 100% free and very easy to use)
If you would not mind doing this and sending screenshots it would mean a lot to us and getting your canonical's straightened out.
screenshots https://snag.gy/ then upload to http://imgur.com/
everything is on the same server I'm assuming?
Of the three below how would you categorize your site?
- https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls
- https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/dynamic-serving
- https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/responsive-design
Respectfully,
Tom
-
-
Would this mean we need canonical only on desktop or mobile site?
-
You are right - you could only use teh rel=alternate if there was an m. version or similar
Regards
Nigel
-
The self referencing canonical advice was solid and I 100% agree with it. The rel=alternate advice, I felt would cause problems (IMO). But as we all know, fiddly issues like this are highly subjective
-
Then there is no problem simply putting a self-referencing canonical. There is in effect no mobile version as there is a single URL so no need for a rel=alternate.
It's an even easier solution. Well, there isn't a problem in the first place.
rel=alternate is only necessary if you have two different URLs! The fact they are the same takes away the problem.
Regards
Nigel
-
Your problem is that you have two different sites loading on the same URL. If you are returning both the mobile and desktop / laptop site on the same URL, you would be expected to be using responsive design. In-fact, you may have re-invented another different way to implement responsive design which is probably, slightly less fluid yet slightly more efficient :')
Since your mobile and desktop pages both reside on exactly the same URL, I'd test the page(s) with this tool (the mobile friendly tool) and this tool (the page-speed insights tool). If Google correctly views your site as mobile friendly, and if within PageSpeed insights Google is correctly differentiating between the mobile and desktop site versions (check the mobile and desktop tabs) then both URLs should canonical to themselves (self referencing canonical) and no alternate tag should be used or deployed. Google will misread the alternate tag, which points to itself - as an error. That tag is to be used when your separate mobile site (page) exists on a separate URL, like an 'm.' subdomain or something like that
Imagine you are Googlebot. You are crawling in desktop mode, load the desktop URL version and find that the page says, it (itself) is also the mobile page. You'd get really confused
Check to see whether your implementation is even supported by Google using the tools I linked you to. If it is, then just use self referencing canonical tags and do not deploy alternate tags (which would make no sense, since both versions of the site are on the same URL). When people build responsive sites (same source code on the same URL, but it's adaptive CSS which re-organises the contents of the page based upon viewport widths) - they don't use alternate tags, only canonicals
Since your situation is more similar to responsive design (from a crawling perspective) than it is to separate mobile site design, drop the alt
-
The problem with this is, where you say "corresponding mobile URL" - there isn't one as OP has stated that, two different source codes (pages) can be rendered on the same URL depending upon the user's screen size / user-agent (however they are detecting mobile, and serving different pages)
-
Hi JH
This is very straightforward.
Use the following annotations:
- On the desktop page, add a rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site’s mobile pages.
- On the mobile page, add a link rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.
It is that simple and doing this will not create duplicate content
More here: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/separate-urls
Regards Nigel
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
-
Canonical Issue On AMP
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MuhammadQasimAttari
I have one issue about canonical. kindly guide me about it. I have a site example.com/abc and I convert it on an amp and know its URLs is example.com/abc=?amp. but the search console tells me to add the proper canonical URL but both pages are the same. kindly guide me about it. what will I do?0 -
How to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
Hello, after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site. Current indexation status: The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages Additional info: Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination. Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting: example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100 Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed. When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position). In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages. The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000 And so I have a few questions: Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed? If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt? Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way? As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thpchlk0 -
Http to https Canonical Question
Hello Fellow Moz Friends I have recently went from http to https for the website. Do I keep my canonicals at http or make all https? Will this affect ranking signals? Anything I should be looking out for? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carwrapsolutions0 -
Using on two pages a keyword in alternative language in the title
Hello SEO wizards, The main language on my website is english, and I am wondering if I can add a keyword in russian to couple of pages to the title and image alt tag and maybe header , with the hope that it would rank in google with that russian keyword.. But I am not sure how google would react to that, I tried to search information on that, but could not find a clear answer.... Many thanks for anybody who takes time to respond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Safely change canonical URL many times
Hi, We are actually working on a new product information section for our network of websites (site A, B, C and D) where product landing pages allow to download information in pdf format and are active for downloads during a period of two months (active form for commercial reasons) with a unique URL (the case today). Here is a possible scenario for these product landing pages in the near future: Product is promoted in website A during 2 months (January to February) so canonical URL = A/page. Once expired, the product info. download form disappears. Customer decides to promote the same product in the same site A as well in site B from April to May so canonical URL will still be A/page. Canonical URL of B/page will point to A/page. Customer decides to relaunch his product promotion this time in site C from July to August so canonical URLs of pages A/page and B/page will now point to C/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form At the end of the year the customer does another campaign for the same product this time in website D so we will change the canonical URL of pages A/page, B/page and C/page to D/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form The obvious question here is: will this way of changing canonical URLs dynamically hurt the SEO of the section, pages, one particular website or the whole network ? Would it be better and safer to just keep the first canonical URL forever? A/page in this example Thanks so much for your input on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulienLetellier0 -
Canonical url question
i just search seomoz tooll it say duplicate content for www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.php should i use canonical url for this ? is yes then is this right ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Canonical URL redirect to different domain - SEO benefits?
Hello Folks, We are having a SEO situation here, and hope your support will help us figure out that. Let's say there are two different domains www.subdomian.domianA.com and www.domainB.com. subdomain.domainA is what we want to promote and drive SEO traffic. But all our content lies in domainB. So one of the thoughts we had is to duplicate the domainB's content on subdomian.domainA and have a canonical URL redirect implemented. Questions: Will subdomain.domainA.com get indexed in search engines for the content in domainB by canonical redirect? Do we get the SEO benefits? So is there any other better way to attain this objective? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0