Canonicalization, does it still index
-
If I have 2 pages that are identical but on different domains that our team manages, if we place a rel=canonical tag on the page we prefer/should display, will the page that doesn't have the canonical tag still be indexed and show on SERPs?
-
You will place the same canonical tag on both pages...
The page at www.domainintheserps.com/product-a/ will appear in the SERPs.
The page at www.othersite.com/product-a/ will not appear in the SERPs (if google finds and obeys your canonical tag)
The value of all links (including internal links) that point to www.othersite.com/product-a/ will be transferred to www.domainintheserps.com/product-a/ All of those links will show in your Google search console backlinks.
If your pages are not identical or if Google doesn't like one of your sites or one of your pages, it is possible that Google will ignore you instructions. Canonical tags are suggestions not commands. Also, Google can be very slow to find and obey canonical tags. It can take months.
Your page at www.othersite.com/product-a/ will sometimes appear in the SERPs for any of the following queries
site:othersite.com
site:domainintheserps.com
site:othersite.com product-a
site:domainintheserps.com product-a
So, your competitors can figure out if you are doing this stuff.
I forgot to answer one of your questions... "Does it still index"? Maybe. It will likely be indexed upon discovery. Then, at a later time, the canonical will be obeyed and it will drop from the SERPs.
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
-
cross canonicalization with redirect
I'm working with a website that has turned one of its pages into its own website within the main website - mostly for the ease of customers, making it simpler to access that page using www.page.com rather than www.mainsite.com/about/page.
Technical SEO | | Shrine.SEO.Gal
As a result, there are two urls for that page (the ones just mentioned), both pointing to the exact same page, but with different urls. Now, they have made it so www.mainsite.com/about/page permanently redirects to www.page.com. which I thought was a good call. However, what do I do about canonicalization? Is it good to point the canonicalization of www.page.com to www.mainsite.com/about/page so that the rankings and link equity are maintained in the main website? Or would the fact that the www.mainsite.com/about/page redirects to www.page.com mess that up? I hope this makes sense!0 -
Indexed, but not shown in search result
Hi all We face this problem for www.residentiebosrand.be, which is well programmed, added to Google Search Console and indexed. Web pages are shown in Google for site:www.residentiebosrand.be. Website has been online for 7 weeks, but still no search results. Could you guys look at the update below? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Is my page being indexed?
To put you all in context, here is the situation, I have pages that are only accessible via an intern search tool that shows the best results for the request. Let's say i want to see the result on page 2, the page 2 will have a request in the url like this: ?p=2&s=12&lang=1&seed=3688 The situation is that we've disallowed every URL's that contains a "?" in the robots.txt file which means that Google doesn't crawl the page 2,3,4 and so on. If a page is only accessible via page 2, do you think Google will be able to access it? The url of the page is included in the sitemap. Thank you in advance for the help!
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Index problems, Part 2
Hi Guy's A few weeks ago i posted a question:
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
https://moz.com/community/q/index-problems After some good advice, we changed a few things: www.domain.com <<< NL version www.domain.com/fr/ <<<< French version (domain.com/nl/ 301 redirect to domain.com). So the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’ went from #32 to #8...... for 2 day's.... and gone.... and not comming back anymore.... Did we missed something? Help is much appreciated, thanks 🙂3 -
Find all 404 links in my site that are indexed
Hi All, Find all 404 links in my site that are indexed. We deleted a lot of URl's from site but now i dont have the track of all we deleted. Any site/Tool can scan the index and give me the exact URL's so I can use https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?hl=en&rlf=all Regards Martin
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Sudden drop in rank and OSE index
I had improved the rank of chairmats.net from page 3 to top of page 2 in Google over the course of a few weeks using on-page, content building, and "low-hanging fruit" link building. All the sudden in the last 2 weeks, we have dropped to 22nd, have dropped out of the OSE index (chairmats.net doesn't show up, but some old links to www.chairmats.net show up), and PA is now 1. DA wasn't high before but also dropped a point. I don't know why the sudden shun (I read about an exact keyword match for low quality websites update with Google recently, but this site has been around for awhile, and is a large supplier of chair mats.) I'm working on getting quality links, it seems a little tougher for a supplier company like this. Any suggestions on recovering?
Technical SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Google indexing page with description
Hello, We rank fairly high for a lot of terms but Google is not indexing our descriptions properly. An example is with "arnold schwarzenegger net worth". http://www.google.ca/search?q=arnold+schwarzenegger+net+worth&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a When we add content, we throw up a placeholder page first. The content gets added with no body content and the page only contains the net worth amount of the celebrity. We then go back through and re-add the descriptions and profile bio shortly after. Will that affect how the pages are getting indexed and is there a way we can get Google to go back to the page and try to index the description so it doesn't just appear as a straight link? Thanks, Alex
Technical SEO | | Anti-Alex0 -
How do https pages affect indexing?
Our site involves e-commerce transactions that we want users to be able to complete via javascript popup/overlay boxes. in order to make the credit card form secure, we need the referring page to be secure, so we are considering making the entire site secure so all of our site links wiould be https. (PayPal works this way.) Do you think this will negatively impact whether Google and other search engines are able to index our pages?
Technical SEO | | seozeelot0
