This one is complicated... canonicals, href lang tags and no index
-
Bear with me, this is complicated (I REALLY hope one of you comes along and says, no it isn't!)
Scenario
A client has multiple english pages, as they have a unique product offering in AUS, US, UK, NZ and also have a global site in english.
Obviously there is a lot of duplicate content and they have the relevant href lang tags set-up to help Google untangle what should be ranked where. They also have rel-canonical on each page.
I've set-up search console for each of the folder structures, i.e. en-us, en-gb, en-au and so on.
They have an optimised page for one of their primary keywords, which ranks nowhere for this exact keyword, but this page DOES rank for 40 similar keywords.
For the exact keyword, they rank 52nd, and frustratingly, it's the homepage that ranks.
We know the correct page is ranking and is indexed because search console tells us so and we see the exact page appear in SERPs for the other 40 keywords.
When I look at the en-us site in Search Console, it tells me that the home page is not being indexed, because a rel canonical tag is prioritising an alternative page (probably the global site) - however, the en-us homepage is showing up in rankings for a lot of their important keywords.
The site has been live for 6 months and the optimised page for about 3 months.
Questions
1. If search console is saying the homepage is not ranking, how is it showing up in SERPs?
2. Why is the homepage ranking for this important keyword, when there is virtually no mention of the keyword versus the page that is almost perfect according to Moz's on-page grader?
3. Do you need href lang tags AND rel canonical on a page?
4. How long before a new page that is optimised for a keyword take to replace (and hopefully surpass) the homepage?
5. If the US is the most important market, should we guide Google to that fact using rel-canonical?Really appreciate your feedback, hivemind.
Thanks
-
1. Search Console tells you, that they use a canonical for the homepage, that doesn't mean John Mueller is talking about that in this webmaster hangout (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAagTHeF9N0)
2. I can just guess, think it could be a structure thing, and maybe it is to fresh - 6 month old site with several regions set-up in same language. So a lot of duplicates, canonicals aso Google has to deal with. And of course, Homepage is strong, your landingpage may not be strong enaugh. And whatever happens on Googles Page 5 is more or less useless data. If it still happens when you are on page 2, guess than there is a real problem. At the moment, without knowing anything, asuming hreflangs, canonicals are right, think it is a structure, time, pagerank combined thing.
3. You can use canonicals and it depends, if you need them, you need them - no matter if hreflang in use or not. You have to send the same signals, not confusing once. I think here is helpful stuf about hreflang and canonicals working together (https://www.searchviu.com/en/hreflang-canonical/)
4. It depends on depth, difficulty, and a lot more factors. I cant say anything here without topic or domain / page
5. You use hreflang, so you tell google what to rank where. Sending confusing signals (hreflang to a page wich has a canonical to anywhere wich has an hreflang-back to that page. Nice confusing chain... ) google will start to ignore your canonicals in this case
Hope that helps a bit
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
-
Are my language tags correct?
Hello, I have a Spanish website for Spanish speaking people es.example.com. I also have example.com for all English speaking people across the world. I want that users who go to google.es and search in English get our example.com site and others who search in Spanish on google.es get the Spanish site. Should the tags be like this: Or should we also have this tag aswell to specify? Otherwise we might only show the es.domain even for english queris? :
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advertisingtech0 -
International Href Lang Tag Parameter Issue
Hey, let's say I'm on the following page.. site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=womens I view the page source and it looks like this.. My question is, should I remove the parameter for the hreflang tag???? I just need some clarification that NO parameter page should have a canonical tag and / or href lang with parameters..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggpaul5620 -
Why is google truncating my title tag?
We are trying to figure out why the search result for the term "au pair" is not matching our designated title tag or anything on our page. If you search "au pair", please see the result for the domain interexchange.org. We do not see this problem with other search terms.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jrjames830 -
De Index Section of Page?
Hey all! We're having a couple of issues with a certain section of our page that we don't want to index. Basically, our cross sells change really quickly, and big G is ranking them and linking to them even when they've long gone. Is it possible to put some kind of no index tag for a specific section of the page? See below 🙂 http://www.freestylextreme.com/uk/Home/Brands/DC-Shoe-Co-/Mens-DC-Shoe-Co-Hoodies-and-Sweaters/DC-Black-Rob-Dyrdek-Official-Sweater.aspx Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | elbeno0 -
Rel=canonical on image pages
Hi, Im working on a Wordpress hosted blog site. I recently did a "site:search" in Google for a specific article page to make sure it was getting crawled, and it returned three separate URLs in the search results. One was the article page, and the other two were the URLs that hosted the images that are found in the article. Would you suggest adding the rel=canonical tag to the pages that host the images so they point back to the actual context article page? Or are they fine being left alone? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dbfrench0 -
Indexing issue?
Hey guys when I do a search of site:thetechblock.com query in Google I don't seem to see any recent posts (nothing for August). In Google webmaster I see that the site is being crawled (I think), but I'm not sure. I also see the the sitemaps are being indexed but again it just seems really odd that I'm not seeing these in Google results. SEO seems all good too with SEO Moz. Is there something I'm not getting?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ttb0 -
Can you use more than one meta robots tag per page?
If you want to add both "noindex, follow" and "noopd" should you add two meta robots tags or is there a way to combine both into one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
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