Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
-
I have 2 questions about canonicalization.
1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B?
2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized?
Thanks.
-
Hi Guys...sorry, one more question here.
About the recovery of rankings for canonicalized page after removing canonical tag, the theories seem very true but are there any case studies or direct experiences which proves these theories?
-
Thank you for your advice! Greatly appreciated
-
Thanks. That answers my query.
-
If the canonicalization is accepted by Google and there is no additional UGC on Page A, then no Page A will not rank.
If the canonicalization is not accepted (i.e. the pages have enough differences to where Google does not feel the pages should be canonicalized) then Page A can rank.
If the pages are identical, but there is some unique content on Page A such as a comment, then Page A can rank for the unique comment.
-
One more question. If page A has been canonicalized to page B, will Page A rank ? As according to search engines, Page B is the preferred page Now. I know it may seem innocuous query to you. But would like to know ?
-
Didn't expected such a detailed explanation to my query :). Thanks a lot Ryan for making SEO seems less daunting to me with your insightful answers.
-
Search engines follow links. If there are links on a page, then Google wants to know what is on the page. There are many reasons to visit a canonicalized page.
1. Canonical links are a suggestion. Google does not have to agree, and may choose to index the page rather then follow through to the canonical version of the page.
2. Sometimes two pages can have the same core content, but different UGC. Let's say you write a great article on SEO and post it on your site. Later, you post the article on the SEOmoz blog with an agreement that the SEOmoz version of the article offers a canonical link to your page.
When people read the SEOmoz article, they may offer comments (UGC) which offer questions, answers, links, etc. All of these comments are only on the SEOmoz page, not the page on your site. Depending on what a user searches for, the result could be the SEOmoz page, even though it has a canonical link to the page on your site.
3. As you shared, the canonical tag can change. A search engine needs to check to see if the canonical tag changed, or a noindex tag has been added, or any of the links on the page have changed, etc. Also the content could change as well.
-
O.k, so Google will visit the page A, but what purpose does it serve ? The original page is B now. Just curious to know...
-
Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B?
Yes. Google will visit your pages by following links even if the page is canonicalized. I would imagine they may choose to visit the page less frequently (that is just my guess) but they do revisit the page.
If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized?
Yes BUT I can only assume the page was canonicalized for a reason, and that reason being the content was duplicated. If you have a duplicate content issue you will not be happy with the result. If you remove the canonical tag because you have modified the page's content to be unique, then you can expect the page to be indexed normally.
It may take up to a month for all the ranking to settle for the page, but it will happen.
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
-
Pages excluded from Google's index due to "different canonicalization than user"
Hi MOZ community, A few weeks ago we noticed a complete collapse in traffic on some of our pages (7 out of around 150 blog posts in question). We were able to confirm that those pages disappeared for good from Google's index at the end of January '18, they were still findable via all other major search engines. Using Google's Search Console (previously Webmastertools) we found the unindexed URLs in the list of pages being excluded because "Google chose different canonical than user". Content-wise, the page that Google falsely determines as canonical instead has little to no similarity to the pages it thereby excludes from the index. False canonicalization About our setup: We are a SPA, delivering our pages pre-rendered, each with an (empty) rel=canonical tag in the HTTP header that's then dynamically filled with a self-referential link to the pages own URL via Javascript. This seemed and seems to work fine for 99% of our pages but happens to fail for one of our top performing ones (which is why the hassle 😉 ). What we tried so far: going through every step of this handy guide: https://moz.com/blog/panic-stations-how-to-handle-an-important-page-disappearing-from-google-case-study --> inconclusive (healthy pages, no penalties etc.) manually requesting re-indexation via Search Console --> immediately brought back some pages, others shortly re-appeared in the index then got kicked again for the aforementioned reasons checking other search engines --> pages are only gone from Google, can still be found via Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines Questions to you: How does the Googlebot operate with Javascript and does anybody know if their setup has changed in that respect around the end of January? Could you think of any other reason to cause the behavior described above? Eternally thankful for any help! ldWB9
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SvenRi1 -
Will two navigation components (one removed by Javascript) impact Google rankings?
We are trying to eliminate tedium when developing complexly designed responsive navigations for mobile, desktop and tablet. The changes between breakpoints in our designs are too complex to be handled with css, so we are literally grabbing individual elements with javascript and moving them around. What we'd like to do instead is have two different navigations on the page, and toggle which one is on the DOM based on breakpoint. These navigations will have the same links but different markup. Will having two navigation components on the page at page load negatively impact our Google SEO rankings or potential to rank, even if we are removing one or the other from the DOM with JavaScript?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CaddisInteractive0 -
HTML5: Changing 'section' content to be 'main' for better SEO relevance?
We received an HTML5 recommendation that we should change onpage text copy contained in 'section" to be listed in 'main' instead, because this is supposedly better for SEO. We're questioning the need to ask developers spend time on this purely for a perceived SEO benefit. Sure, maybe content in 'footer' may be seen as less relevant, but calling out 'section' as having less relevance than 'main'? Yes, it's true that engines evaluate where onpage content is located, but this level of granular focus seems unnecessary. That being said, more than happy to be corrected if there is actually a benefit. On a side note, 'main' isn't supported by older versions of IE and could cause browser incompatibilities (http://caniuse.com/#feat=html5semantic). Would love to hear others' feedback about this - thanks! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Wrong page getting ranked
Hi all, we have product category pages on our ecommerce web site and we also produce blog content (such as buyers guides, setup guides etc) to help with ranking and give our site some good quality, unique content. However we are sometimes finding that the buyers guide / blog content gets ranked by Google over our product category page. I'm hoping, if I give an example or two, some one smart out there may be able to point me in the right direction as to how we can avoid this and get the product category page ranked instead? You will see from my examples we are linking internally using the keywords from the buyers guides to the product category pages in order to show the most important page to Google for these keywords and are trying to structure the product category pages as well as possible to make it the most optimized page for the term. Example: Keyword "twin dvd player"... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/dvd/portable-dvd-player-car/twin-dvd-player/ ... blog page actually getting ranked for this keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/dual-screen-and-twin-dvd-player-explained/ Keyword "site radio".... product category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/audio/radio/site-radio/ .... blog buyer guide page actually getting ranked for keyword: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/advice-center/Site-radio-buying-guide/ Any help / pointers appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasef0 -
I have removed over 2000+ pages but Google still says i have 3000+ pages indexed
Good Afternoon, I run a office equipment website called top4office.co.uk. My predecessor decided that he would make an exact copy of the content on our existing site top4office.com and place it on the top4office.co.uk domain which included over 2k of thin pages. Since coming in i have hired a copywriter who has rewritten all the important content and I have removed over 2k pages of thin pages. I have set up 301's and blocked the thin pages using robots.txt and then used Google's removal tool to remove the pages from the index which was successfully done. But, although they were removed and can now longer be found in Google, when i use site:top4office.co.uk i still have over 3k of indexed pages (Originally i had 3700). Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and more importantly how i can fix it? Our ranking on this site is woeful in comparison to what it was in 2011. I have a deadline and was wondering how quickly, in your opinion, do you think all these changes will impact my SERPs rankings? Look forward to your responses!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | apogeecorp0 -
How is Google's algorithm evolving in terms of DA vs PA value?
how is Google evolving in terms of value for DA vs PA? Is having a link from a DA 75 + PA 25 better than having a link from a DA 50 + PA 50, assuming such 2 websites are otherwise identical? I have a couple of .EDU backlinks where DA is around 80, though PA 1. Would be DA 40 with a PA 40 be more valuable? I hear Google is placing increasing value on the domain and less on the page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen
Any insight appreciated thank you0 -
Tool to calculate the number of pages in Google's index?
When working with a very large site, are there any tools that will help you calculate the number of links in the Google index? I know you can use site:www.domain.com to see all the links indexed for a particular url. But what if you want to see the number of pages indexed for 100 different subdirectories (i.e. www.domain.com/a, www.domain.com/b)? is there a tool to help automate the process of finding the number of pages from each subdirectory in Google's index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0