Why do two pages compete while a canonical tag is active?
-
Hi guys,
My SERP analysis show me that two pages compete eachother for the keyword kinderfiets, which should not happen since there is a canonical tag is active.
www.halfords.nl/fiets/kinderfiets/kinderfiets/ Ranks #6 and www.halfords.nl/fiets/kinderfiets/ Ranks #7. The first one is a subcategory which is one step deeper than the second one. I prefer consumers to land on the broader subcategory, because that one shows more products.Furthermore, we already did some SEO tweaking for the #7 page, but did not work on the #6 page. So it is even kind of strange that this page ranks higher.Can somebody help me out?Kind Regards,Tom
-
The canonical tag is meant to tell Google.... "These two pages are the same"
It was not meant to prioritize pages in the rankings.
Because your pages are very different from one another Google is probably ignoring the canonical tag.
"should we just appreciate the fact that Google ranks us twice on the first page for this important keyword? "
Yes. You got two pages in the top ten of Google. When that happens to me, I give thanks.
-
Hi Martijn,
Thanks for your response. Okay, seems logic. So is there an easy way to fix this "problem" so we can boost this category into the top 5 or should we just appreciate the fact that Google ranks us twice on the first page for this important keyword?
Kind regards,
Tom -
Hi Tom,
Likely due to the internal linking structure of the subcategory your page /kinderfiets/kinderfiets is ranking better or it just has some more history/relevance. My guess is that it's likely a close call knowing the Dutch market a bit. You're mentioning that the canonical tag is active, but they're also both unique as they are self-referencing. So basically they don't play a role at all as you're suggesting that they're not the same page and both could rank.
Martijn.
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
-
Hi! I first wrote an article on my medium blog but am now launching my site. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming blog is original when medium was posted first?
Hi! As above, I wrote this article on my medium blog but am now launching my site, UnderstandingJiuJitsu.com. I have the post saved as a draft because I don't want to get pinged by google. a) how can I get a canonical tag on medium without importing and b) any issue with claiming the UJJ.com post is original when medium was posted first? Thanks and health, Elliott
Technical SEO | | OpenMat0 -
How do I prevent duplicate page title errors from being generated by my multiple shop pages?
Our e-commerce shop has numerous pages within the main shop page. Users navigate through the shop via typical pagination. So while there may be 6 pages of products it's all still under the main shop page. Moz keeps flagging my shop pages as having duplicate titles (ie shop page 2). But they're all the same page. Users aren't loading unique pages each time they go to the next page of products and they aren't pages I can edit. I'm not sure how to prevent this issue from popping up on my reports.
Technical SEO | | NiteSkirm0 -
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Changing title tag in wordpress media pages
Hello! I have a problem of duplicate title on 59 pages in Worpress. I Guess it happened after a recent WP update, because, suddenly, I got a peak of 59 from zero in a day. The SeoMoz crawl report states that there are 59 duplicate title. As you may see in the picture those are all media pages, whose title is written really badly with the formula postname/filename/blogTitle, ending up with trunkated, too long, title tags, that result in duplicate page title. How can I simply hide these mediapages or sculpting the title tag the way I want? I am using all-in-one-seo WP plugin, which doesn't seem to provide a solution. Thank you all! DoMiSol Rossini SOwZg5C.jpg
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Two Domains for the Same Page
We are creating a website for a client that will have hundreds of geographically driven landing pages. These pages will all have a similar domain structure. For example www.domain.com/georgia-atlanta-fastfood-121 We want the domain to be SEO friendly, however it also needs to be print friendly for a business card. (ex www.domain.com/121) The client has requested that we have two domains for each page. One for the Search Engines and then another shorter one for print/advertising purposes. If we do that will search engines the site for duplicate content? I really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks! Anna
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
Canonical and 301
Hi We have recently restructured our site and 301 redirected some pages. Unfortunately the new page which we 301 to, still had the canonical tags pointing to the old pages. Would this cause google not to index the new pages....?????
Technical SEO | | jj34340 -
Index page
To the SEO experts, this may well seem a silly question, so I apologies in advance as I try not to ask questions that I probably know the answer for already, but clarity is my goal I have numerous sites ,as standard practice, through the .htaccess I will always set up non www to www, and redirect the index page to www.mysite.com. All straight forward, have never questioned this practice, always been advised its the ebst practice to avoid duplicate content. Now, today, I was looking at a CMS service for a customer for their website, the website is already built and its a static website, so the CMS integration was going to mean a full rewrite of the website. Speaking to a friend on another forum, he told me about a service called simple CMS, had a look, looks perfect for the customer ... Went to set it up on the clients site and here is the problem. For the CMS software to work, it MUST access the index page, because my index page is redirected to www.mysite.com , it wont work as it cant find the index page (obviously) I questioned this with the software company, they inform me that it must access the index page, I have explained that it wont be able to and why (cause I have my index page redirected to avoid duplicate content) To my astonishment, the person there told me that duplicate content is a huge no no with Google (that's not the astonishing part) but its not relevant to the index and non index page of a website. This goes against everything I thought I knew ... The person also reassured me that they have worked within the SEO area for 10 years. As I am a subscriber to SEO MOZ and no one here has anything to gain but offering advice, is this true ? Will it not be an issue for duplicate content to show both a index page and non index page ?, will search engines not view this as duplicate content ? Or is this SEO expert talking bull, which I suspect, but cannot be sure. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, it would make my life a lot easier for the customer to use this CMS software, but I would do it at the risk of tarnishing the work they and I have done on their ranking status Many thanks in advance John
Technical SEO | | Johnny4B0 -
Dynamic page
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this "According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " ) _http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems" I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.0
