Hey Leo!

Thanks for the taking the time to answer me. I am going to set this up exactly as you recommend.

1. I will install the same GA code from domain.com on tickets.domain.com

2. Do you think I need to set the canonical URL on the various ticketing pages all back to the main domain?
e.g. tickets.domain.com ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event1 ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event2 ---> canonical to domain.com
e.g. tickets.domain.com/event3 ---> canonical to domain.com
and so on?

3. We did make all the header links of tickets.domain.com point straight back to their counterpart on domain.com.

Does this seem like I basically got it all correct?

Thanks again
Adam

We have a client in need of a ticketing solution for their domain (let's call it www.domain.com) which is on Wordpress - as is our custom ticket solution.  However, we want to have full control of the ticketing, since we manage it for them - so we do not want to build it inside their original Wordpress install.

Our proposed solution is to build it on tickets.domain.com.  This will exist only for selling and issuing the tickets.

The question is, is there a way to do this without damaging their bounce rate and SEO scores?
Since customers will come to www.domain.com, then click the ticketing tab and land on tickets.domain.com, Google will see this as a bounce.  In reality, customers will not notice the difference as we will clone the look and feel of domain.com

Should we perhaps have the canonical URL of tickets.domain.com point to www.domain.com? And also, can we install Webmaster Tools for tickets.domain.com and set the preferred domain as www.domain.com?

Are these possible solutions to the problem, or not - and if not, does anyone else have a viable solution?

Thank you so much for the help.

I wrote to Yoast about this issue but they wouldn't respond because I am using the free plugin. I may respond and let them know about this discussion. Seems like a valid legitimate question, no?  I would love an official response...

Gianluca - so you believe their is no reason to actually go in and fix this?

Hey Dave - great suggestion. I did that and it worked.

http://note.io/1zJ8cTZ

Doesn't it seem strange to you that Yoast, the master of SEO - automatically does this?
Kind of makes me think that Google doesn't see the trailing slash as a different URL for the homepage.  Wouldn't their team catch this or address it?

Hey Linda - I appreciate that - however when I read that article - its still seemed to open to debate if this is necessary to fix or not. Are you aware of a way to have it autofixed in wordpress? The only solution I read there was either hacking Yoast SEO to remove the trailing slash - or to manually edit every single page.

Am I over thinking this? I agreed with one poster who mentioned that Moz appears to have wanted this issue correct because their homepage shows that moz.com does not have the trailing slash in the canonical tag - nor does yoast.com.

Odd to me then that the Yoast plugin would then add this.

Are you aware of a way to remove it that is more effective?

We are using Yoast for a number of our sites.  We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash:

Example:   http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/

Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons.

Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress.

Sorry for my ignorance.

Thanks for any help.

We are using Yoast for a number of our sites.  We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash:

Example:   http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/

Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons.

Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress.

Sorry for my ignorance.

Thanks for any help.