At what point is the canonical tag crawled
-
Do search engines (specifically Google) crawl the url in the canonical tag as it loads or do they load the whole page before crawling it?
Thanks,
-
Yes i think you are better off putting your time into fixing the canonical tag on the server side. It may even look sus doing what you are doing.
I would go to WMT and view as google bot and see how they see it, i think they will read the tag before any js.
-
It's for a temporary fix for a page that has been poorly made in a CMS. The template for the page contains a malformed canonical element so we're trying to bandage it up by inserting some js that removes this element into the body of the page. Obviously if the canonical URL is crawled before the js can run then it's pointless even trying.
-
Do you mean follow the canonical?
Eitehr way logic would suggestthat the page is read first. As html tags have a begining and end tag, trying to crawl a half loaded page would not work untill the end tags are read.
I am curiouse as to why you would want to know 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
-
Canonical Advice - ?
Hi everyone, I have a bit of problem with duplicate content on a newly launched site and looking for some advice on which pages to canonicalize. Our legacy site had product "information" pages that now 301 to new product information pages. The reason for the legacy having these pages (instead of pages where you can purchase) is because we used our vendors "cart link", which was an iframe inside the website. So in order to get ranked for these products, we created these pages, that had links to the frame where they could buy. The strategy worked, and we got ranked for our products. Now with the new site, we have those same product information pages, but when you click the link to buy, it goes to a page which now is on our actual site, where you can make the purchase, but this page contains the same basic information, though it looks very different. So my question --- the product "information" pages, are the new 301 homes and are the pages with the rank. The purchase pages are new and have no rank, but are essentially duplicate content. Should I put the canonical link element on the purchase page and tell Google to regard the information pages since those are ranked? It just seems weird to me to direct Google away from the place where people can purchase, however, the purchase pages aren't nearly as "pretty" as the information pages are, and wouldn't be the greatest landing pages. We have an automotive site, and the purchase page you have to enter vehicle information. The information page is nicer, and if the visitor is interested, its just one click to get to that page to buy. What to do here? I am fairly new to Moz, and I couldn't determine whether I am permitted to include an example link from our site of what I am referring to. Is that permitted? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | yogitrout1
Kristin0 -
Canonical tag for Home page: with or without / at the end???
Setting up canonical tags for an old site. I really need advice on that darn backslash / at the end of the homepage URL. We have incoming links to the homepage as http://www.mysite.com (without the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/ (with the backslash), and as http://www.mysite.com/index.html I know that there should be 301 redirects to just one version, but I need to know more about the canonical tags... Which should the canonical tag be??? (without the backslash) or (with the backslash) Thanks for your help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | GregB1230 -
Canonical Tag - Magento - Help
Hello, I was hoping to get some help or tips on how to best control the canonical tag on a Magento based website. When you go into the Magento admin and enable the option to use the canonical tag on pages, all that does is input the canonical tag to the exact page just with the http:// in the url. My goal is to use the canonical tag on specific pages and point it to other pages, not just the same page with an http:// For example, right now for page: example.com/question/baseball the canonical tag is pointing to http://example.com/question/baseball What i want is to be able to do is take: example.com/question/baseball and have the canonical tag point to example.com/question/baseballbats Is this possible? Does what I'm saying make sense? Please let me know what you all think.... Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Canonical tags
How hard is it to put in Canonical tags on a webpage? My web guy didn't do it because he put in redirects in place for all old URLs and all content
Technical SEO | | Boodreaux
(except error pages and advanced searches) should have a unique URL. By not having canonical tags does it lose link juice? Not sure if that question makes sense. 🙂 Poo1 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Duplicate title tag error
Hi all, I am new to SEO, and we have just launched a new version of our site (kept the domain name the same though). I keep getting errors for duplicate title tags - e.g. www.sandafayre.com/default.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/Default.aspx, www.sandafayre.com/StampAuctions.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/stampauctions.aspx (plus loads others :o). The only difference each time seems to be the capitalisation of the first character - but I though URLs were not case sensitive? I've been advised to add the rel canonical tag to one of the pages, but the problem is I really only have 1 version of each page! Can anybody help please? Many thanks in advance! Nikki
Technical SEO | | Stampy780 -
Site maintenance and crawling
Hey all, Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime. We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops. My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index). I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Technical SEO | | Daylan1 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0