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Thanks Dirk for your great in-depth response!
I will now check with developers what the estimated effort would be. Making the canonical URL available will let me sleep better at night before releasing the new site version.
I think the risk shouldn't be huge if we cannot do this and will not waste too many ressources on this (unless, of course, we see a negative impact, which I will then report here;)
Best,
Phil
Thank you Dirk!
I did look at the article you pointed out, but could not initially find that information:
"Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)"
However, for me this is not 100% conclusive. The page does exist, in a way, but it's redirected. I know that to be on the safe side, we should better make it available. But as it would mean a lot of additional programming effort, I am trying to find out if it really is necessary. Thats' why I was hoping someone already has some experience with this...
Hi
We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL.
For instance:
Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL:
But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?
Errors indicated in Webmaster Tools are often inaccurate. Unfortunately, there is not much else to do than manually go through the errors and see for yourself whether there actually are problems. Maybe you want to compare indications in Webm.-Tools with other crawlers (such as Open Site Explorer).
Hi Alec
Depending on what your website is about, I usually find it best to get links from partners and cooperators. Is someone distributing or using your product? Try to get them to state this on their site! Anyone you regularly cooperate with? Make sure they will say so on their site.
Careful not to overdo it with the link. Take it easy, create links step by step and don't get too many at once...
Hi Peter
I think you should be fine. Redirecting old URLs that no longer exist is a best practice and helpful for users. Of course, those 301'd URLs should drop out of Google's index after a while. But this should be okay. You only want URLs to appear in SERPs that actually do have content.
It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.
It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...
Good point with the backlinks! Currently, both robots.txt files are open and google does not seem to have canonicalization problems so far. So it makes sense to leave it this way anyways... Thanks Thomas!
We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https.
I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt?
Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...
Yes, I think the crucial point is that addressing googlebot wouldn't resolve the specific problem I have here.
I would have tried adressing googlebot otherwise. But to be honest, I wouldn't have expected a much different result than specifying all user agents. Googlebot should be part of that exclusion in any case.
Actually, in my experience the quickest way is to 301 redirect it to another URL. This is even quicker than disabling the URL and let it return a 404 (which would be my second choice).
Also, keep in mind that only using GWT does not have any impact on Bing!
10 hours shouldn't pose a problem - i've had no worries even with longer downtime. googlebot won't even have tried to access most of your pages in that time, so i'm sure only a fraction of pages was unaccessible for the bot during the downtime (namely those it had on crawl schedule then).
to be sure, you can always check the crawl stats on GWT and see if there is any significant change.
If the links are legit and connect to good sources I wouldn't nofollow them. Personally, I only use nofollow for paid ads (if they don't run via an adserver) and user generated content.
If you have those 25 links on a single page, it might be a bit too much - unless it's a link page or such. If the are spread on your entire domain, it's no problem.
Don't worry too much about the page rank and think about content and topic relation. If the sites you link to are topically closely related to your own content, then it can actually help your own rankings if they are of high quality. For instance, if your site is about rocket science, it makes good sense to link to nasa.gov (it would actually look strange if there is no link to this rocket-related authority). Not that I want to sound like matt cutts, but if these links add value to your users, then they deserve to be followed:)
Well, if Moz is able to find such URLs, these dynamic versions are linked-to from somewhere in your content. This is still not optimal, even if you use rel=canonical. If you can find the source and change these URLs to a non-dynamic version, this will still be better. Otherwise just ignore the warning in the report...
It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.
It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...
i wouldn't use nofollow in that case either. link juice is no longer preserved by using nofollow, so other than sites "not trusted" or links that are "paid for" (as stated by EGOL), i no longer see other reasons to use them. i just can't think of an advantage here.
and if you don't want pages like privacy policy etc. indexed, you'd better go with meta robots "noindex".
just give it a few days of weeks until google recrawls the page. or alternatively. if you dont' want to wait, you can submit the url again via webmaster tools. i think here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?pli=1&hl=en
but with such a minor fix there's no hurry IMO
That's definitely not SEOMoz's usual customer service. So far, I've always gotten very quick and helpful responses. Mistakes can happen though - reply again to your thread and I'm sure you'll get an answer quickly.
The links are not related to your IP, but to the URL. If images are available on both img.domain and www.domain, then you have a duplication issue. Best practice is to 301 redirect from the old to the new URL to give a clear indication of the unique location they are on.
as old as it may sound... but provide good content to the sites you want links from. one of the most successful strategies in my opinion, is still offering sites custom content according to their needs: offer to write them a specific article about the topic they desire. have the article include a link to a helpful page on your site.
of course, try to get good variation in the domains you chose to get links from. steer clear of spammy sites. and make sure you have a lot of anchor text variation. a LOT! in my experience, overoptimization of anchor text and only using the same kind of blogs for backlinks is what can hurt most.