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.
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
-
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice.
Scenario
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains.Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default":<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" />Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” .
Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check.Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs?
Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.
-
Hi Alex
I think there's likely two issues here - the SEO one, and the PPC/Ads one.
Hi Alex
Google Ads doesn't particularly care about duplication or indexing, so you can have variants for this purpose that are simply noindex and not linked to on your site. Of course it's also find to use pages that exist as international SEO variants, but it's not necessary to do so.
So, for the PPC issue - I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that landing page experience will affect your cost. However, it isn't related to "duplicate without user-selected canonical" - instead, it's a separate algorithm that figures out whether the ad and the page are relevant to each other. A PPC consultant would be the right person to talk to this about.
For the SEO issue - it sounds like Google maybe isn't respecting your hreflang tags, for it to be flagging them as duplicates. This could be because their content is too similar - even if it's in the same language, it should have localisations for Google to respect it as meaningfully different. Alternatively, it could be because the markup is incomplete.
If you do decide to use canonical tags, each localised page should canonical to itself, whilst keeping the existing hreflang markup pointing to translated versions. Canonical tags can be a good way of sweeping up any variants within a localisation (e.g. UTM tags).
Hope that helps!
Tom
-
Anyone? We are willing to spend some bucks to get a profound answer on this.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?0 -
Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded in Google webmaster tools.
In Google Webmaster Tools, I have a coverage issue. I am getting this error message: Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded. It gives the below blog post page as an example. Any idea how to resolve? At one time, I was using handl utm grabber, but the plugin is deactivated on my website. https://www.savacations.com/turrialba-costa-ricas-garden-city/?utm_source=deleted&utm_medium=deleted&utm_term=deleted&utm_content=deleted&utm_campaign=deleted&gclid=deleted5.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alancito0 -
Special Characters in Negative Keywords in Ads
Howdy, fellow mozzers, I came across this weird suggestion in my Bing account (screenshot link: https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/tt/NDY3OTc5NF8xNDgyMzY4OA) It almost that the dollar sign in the negative keyword is acting like a wildcard character, or being disregarded completely. I did some tests, it seems that in Google Ads that is not happening. Does anyone have an idea if this is normal behavior? I have never seen this before.
Paid Search Marketing | | DmitriiK0 -
Does having redirects in a Adwords text ad destination URL hurt quality scores?
I recently noticed that one of my clients had several redirects in their Adwords text ad destination URLs. I updated the destination URLS to land on the final location (thereby losing all the text ad history). However I'm wondering if this could have any impact on the text ad quality scores (none of them were disapproved).
Paid Search Marketing | | RosemaryB0 -
Google URL Builder / Campaign Tracking on two Different Domain using the Same Analytics Code
Hey Everyone, I think I know the answer to this but I'd like to get some confirmation. I currently have a landing page at "www.xyz.com", it's a separate domain in which only the landing page exists and not a vanity URL which redirects. However, the navigation and all the links on "www.xyz.com" actually link out to "www.abc.com". The domain / landing page "xyz" has the same analytics tracking code as domain "www.abc.com". My question is this, if I use Google URL builder to create custom URL's to track for each ad that I'm running in Adwords, will this data show up in the analytics of "abc" even though it's a separate domain because it has the same analytics code? In other words, does campaign data show only if the domain and the google analytics code line up, or does the domain not matter and as long as you have the same analytics code (despite two separate domains) that campaign data (built through Google URL builder) will show? My hunch and best guess it that as long as the analytics code is the same (regardless of a separate domain) that the data in campaign will show with the custom URL's I build. I'm aware that I can test this and I will but I'd like to get an idea from the community first to make things easier. Anybody have experience with this? Answers greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | EvansHunt0 -
Google Analytics CPC and PPC not Matching
Hi Why do our CPC in Google Analytic not match our PPC in Adword, surely they should be identical? We have Auto-tagging switched on and data in our history is wrong so it is not a timing issue. Thanks
Paid Search Marketing | | Studio330 -
Multiple keyword match types - same ad group, or separate ad groups?
Hi guys, Looking at an account that has historically used broad matching, and i'd now like to take some of the better performing keywords and duplicate as phrase and/or exact match to increase the quality of traffic to the landing pages. I know I can add red shoes, "red shoes" and [red shoes] to the same ad group, however I've also read that people are creating separate groups for each match type. Other than easy of management (same group), or more granular targeting of ads (separate groups), should I go with either approach, or a blend of the two? My key objective in this restructure is to drop the currently high bounce rate on the landing pages by improving the relevance of the incoming traffic. Cheers, Jez
Paid Search Marketing | | jez0000