Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
-
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/
There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one:
Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns.
Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across?
Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
-
Thank you for the responses! Because the actual content on the page isn't seen as duplicate (or anything close using boolean string similarity tools) I think I am just going to differentiate the metadata and try to focus on improving the content on the organic pages.
Thanks for your help!
-
Yeah definitely don't do it the other way around. To be honest if the landing pages are orphaned, Google probably won't rank them anyway. If Google 'is' ranking them instead of the other ones, the real question is why does Google find them more useful, and what can you add from the landing pages to the organic pages - to make them better!
-
Point the canonicals to the pages you kn will have the high organic traffic.
I would rewrite t pages to be different if you want the best results.
All all the best,
Tom
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 optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
I think Google Analytics is mis-reporting organic landing pages.
I have multiple clients whose Google Analytics accounts are showing me that some of the top performing organic landing pages (in terms of highest conversion rates) look like this: /cart.php /quote /checkout.php /finishorder.php /login.php In some cases, these pages are blocked by Robots.txt. In other cases they are not even indexed at all in Google. These pages are clearly part of the conversion process. A couple of them are links sent out when a cart is abandoned, etc. - is it possible they actually came in organically but then re-entered via one of these links which is what Google is calling the organic landing page? How is it possible that these pages would be the top performing landing pages for organic visitors?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks
I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites. The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites. I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it). I also want a different landing page to rank for each term. The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search. Each one targets a different county. However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page. Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy? Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna70840 -
Should we 301 redirect old events pages on a website?
We have a client that has an events category section that is filled to the brim with past events webpages. Another issue is that these old events webpages all contain duplicate meta description tags, so we are concerned that Google might be penalizing our client's website for this issue. Our client does not want to create specialized meta description tags for these old events pages. Would it be a good idea to 301 redirect these old events landing pages to the main events category page to pass off link equity & remove the duplicate meta description tag issue? This seems drastic (we even noticed that searchmarketingexpo.com is keeping their old events pages). However it seems like these old events webpages offer little value to our website visitors. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Are pages with a canonical tag indexed?
Hello here, here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag: 1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index? 2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index? Thank you in advance for any insights! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
Duplicate internal links on page, any benefit to nofollow
Link spam is naturally a hot topic amongst SEO's, particularly post Penguin. While digging around forums etc, I watched a video blog from Matt Cutts posted a while ago that suggests that Google only pays attention to the first instance of a link on the page As most websites will have multiple instances of a links (header, footer and body text), is it beneficial to nofollow the additional instances of the link? Also as the first instance of a link will in most cases be within the header nav, does that then make the content link text critical or can good on page optimisation be pulled from the title attribute? I would appreciate the experiences and thoughts Mozzers thoughts on this thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JustinTaylor880