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.
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
-
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable? -
@Adnan-farooq said in Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document:
i don't think that we used canonical tag for PDF document i think no option is visible on moz
Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.
-
Hitachi Workshop Manual Instant Download PDF at your fingertips. Access valuable resources for quick and efficient equipment maintenance and operation. Don't miss out on this essential source for Hitachi machinery enthusiasts.
-
-
There's two answers to this.
One is that whilst it's best practice for all URLs to have a canonical (even if it's self-referencing), if this resource has no duplicates, it's not mandatory.
The other is that yes, you can add a canonical tag to a web page. You'd have to do it at the HTTP header level.
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 -
How Can I influence the Google Selected Canonical
Our company recently rebranded and launched a new website. The website was developed by an overseas team and they created the test site on their subdomain. The only problem is that Google crawled and indexed their site and ours. I noticed Google indexed their sub domain ahead of our domain and based on Search Console it has deemed our content as the duplicate of theirs and the Google selected theirs as the canonical.
Community | | Spaziohouston
The website in question is https://www.spaziointerni.us
What would be the best course of action to get our content ranked and selected instead of being marked as the duplicate?
Not sure if I have to modify the content to make it more unique or have them submit a removal in their search console.
Our indexed pages continue to go down due to this issue.
Any help is greatly appreciated.1 -
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to SERPs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
International SEO | | Alex_Pisa
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. Goal
We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links. 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/" /> Issue
After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example): User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs. Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google. Question: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
Rel=canonical Weebly
My problem is with my website as it says I have duplicate page titles and contents because of a /index.html. It says the duplicate content is due to the fact that my homepage on my website is www.seacandytackle.com but it is also www.seacandytackle.com/index.html because I use weebly. How can I use the tag to fix this? It won't let me do a 301 redirect because it is a home page. How can I fix this? What code would I have to use and which url? Also it says that I have duplicate page content between http://www.seacandytackle.com/index.html and http://www.seacandytackle.comhttp://www.seacandytackle.com but I don't recall having any page that looks like http://www.seacandytackle.com http://www.seacandytackle.com from weebly. How can I fix this issue as well? Thank you for any help. Step by step implementation would be particularly helpful in using the rel= tags to fix these duplicate issues.
Technical SEO | | SeaCandyTackle0 -
Should we move our documentation off subdomain?
Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com. Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com. We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this? There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform. Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain. WDYT?
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
Hi! I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains. 1 product info page 2 same product but GREEN
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW **Question: ** Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1. Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language? Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ? /Lars0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0