If you only want your home page to rank, can you use rel="canonical" on all your other pages?
-
If you have a lot of pages with 1 or 2 inbound links, what would be the effect of using rel="canonical" to point all those pages to the home page? Would it boost the rankings of the home page?
As I understand it, your long-tail keyword traffic would start landing on the home page instead of finding what they were looking for. That would be bad, but might be worth it.
-
Here's a post from Dr. Pete about doing just that. He lost traffic, he lost indexed pages, and had to beg to Google for a reinclusion request even after he fixed things back again. You don't want to do it.
-
rel canonical is for letting search engines know that a page on your site has duplicate content of another page. However, I doubt all the pages on your site are duplicates of your home page, so the most likely outcome is that the search engines would ignore your rel canonical tags and just index the pages as normal if they're not similar enough.
This is not really the intent of the tag, and to me it sounds like it falls close to the black-hat side of things. If you really want the rankings from those pages, and don't care about them, you can 301 redirect them to your home page like Joshua suggested.
Here's the SEOMoz post from about a year ago about rel canonical. It also links to some good resources: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
-
Lucas,
If you did something like that you would be negatively affecting how many pages that would show up for your site in Google. If you rel="canonical" all your internal pages to the homepage you are in effect telling Google that all of your other pages are duplicate content and that the home page is the only piece of original content on your site and Google will take that out of the listing. If you weren't going to use those low linked to internal pages you could do a 301 redirect those pages to the homepage. By doing that the majority of link juice from those pages would flow to the homepage. The effect could be minimal depending on the quality of the links pointing at those internal pages being redirected, but if they were high quality links then it could make an impact. It will probably take a couple good weeks for Google to make the adjustments.
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
-
Specific vs. Home Page Backlinks
So, I'm getting ready to start a campaign to get some backlinks. Pretty sure this is a silly NOOB question, but what is better: To get backlinks directed to my home page To get backlinks directed to she specific product/topic being discussed in the backlink. Thanks in advance for any help. My GUESS on the whole topic is that linking to a specific product page from a backlink with anchor text is best practice. It will boost the Page Authority of that page while boosting the overall Domain Authority . . . a win win.
Technical SEO | | damon12121 -
Forum website rel="nofollow" is this Good?
Hi, Forum website rel="nofollow" is this Good? We have a Q & A site and have all links as Nofollow. Would this be a good way? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
Can Google show the hReview-Aggregate microformat in the SERPs on a product page if the reviews themselves are on a separate page?
Hi, We recently changed our eCommerce site structure a bit and separated our product reviews onto a a different page. There were a couple of reasons we did this : We used pagination on the product page which meant we got duplicate content warnings. We didn't want to show all the reviews on the product page because this was bad for UX (and diluted our keywords). We thought having a single page was better than paginated content, or at least safer for indexing. We found that Googlebot quite often got stuck in loops and we didn't want to bury the reviews way down in the site structure. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate a little, so having a different reviews page could help with this. In the process of doing this we tidied up our microformats a bit too. The product page used to have to three main microformats; hProduct hReview-Aggregate hReview The product page now only has hProduct and hReview-Aggregate (which is now nested inside the hProduct). This means the reviews page has hReview-Aggregate and hReviews for each review itself. We've taken care to make sure that we're specifying that it's a product review and the URL of that product. However, we've noticed over the past few weeks that Google has stopped feeding the reviews into the SERPs for product pages, and is instead only feeding them in for the reviews pages. Is there any way to separate the reviews out and get Google to use the Microformats for both pages? Would using microdata be a better way to implement this? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
Cn I use SEOMOZ to find "Bad Links"
We were hit by the Penguin update and I am told it make be because of "Bad Links", but no one can seem to tell me how to find them. We never buy links, and in fact the only links I know about are those from paid affiliates through shareasale - and these affiliates are paid based on performance, not links. 1. Does anyone know how to figure out what links are bad? 2. Once I know, how do I get them to stop linking to my site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
"Spam emails" : ranking drop?
Hello, Is it possible that a website gets penalised by Google because your hosting company blocked you from sending emails? Basically I got a message from my hosting company saying that they were blocking me from sending emails from our server and domain because too many had mistakes or were complained about. The same day we dropped from 2<sup>nd</sup> on a keyword to about 600<sup>th</sup> while still being ranked for other keywords. The drop was for our main keyword. Can the fact we sent “bad emails” be related to a rank drop? For the record, those were confiormation emails for account creation, they were legit, not spam. That's off-topic though.
Technical SEO | | EndeR-0 -
Does using tags instead of " " good for SEO purposes?
I'm currently using <pr>tags for paragraphs and came across an article that said it is better for search engines to see the</pr> tag than
Technical SEO | | ibex
tag to separate paragraphs.0 -
Duplicate Content and Canonical use
We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications. Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course. Cheers Martin
Technical SEO | | Martin_S0