Cononical URL problem
-
Hello,
In the keywords difficulty tool, one of my client's sites has a different number for links to root domain and links to page even though they're both the home page.
How do I tell if I have a cononical URL problem, and what do I do about it if I do?
Thank you.
-
The Keyword Difficulty Tool doesn't tell you if you have a canonical URL problem. The metrics used in that report highlight inbound links and are separated into two categories:
-
Root Domain Linking Root Domain - this is the total number of unique root domains links to your entire website regardless if it's the home page, contact, about, testimonials, etc.
-
Page Linking Root Domains - this is the total number of unique root domains linking to that specific page ONLY and in your case, the home page.
-
-
I see. That makes sense
-
My understanding is that in the Keywords Difficulty tool, "Page Linking Root Domains" is the number of different root domains linking to that exact page that is ranking for the keyword that you entered into the tool, whereas "Root Domain Linking Root Domains" (kind of mouthful) is the number of different root domains linking to anywhere on your root domain (in other words, any page on your site). The latter should always be higher than the former, whether it's the home page or not, unless the only links you have are to your home page.
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
-
To update or not to update news URLs ?
We manage a huge daily news website in my small country - keeping this a bit mysterious in case competitors are reading 🙂 Our URL structure is www.companyname.com/news/categoryofnews/title-of-article?id=articleid In this hyperreactive news world, title of articles change frequently (may be ten times a day for the main stories). The question we debate is : should we reflect the modification of the title in the URL or not ? Example : "Trump says he wants to ban search engines" would have URL http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-says-he-wants-to-ban-search-engines?id=12345678 Later in the day the title becomes "Trump denies he suggested banning search engines". Should the URL be modified to http://www.companyname.com/news/entertainment/Trump-denies-he-suggested-banning-search-engines?id=12345678 (option A) or not (option B) ? In Google News it makes no difference because of the sitemap, but in Google organic things are different. At present (option B in place), Google apparently doesn't see that the article has been updated, and shows the initial timestamp which is visually (and presumably SEOwise) not good : our new news looks like old news. Modifiying the URL would solve that issue, but could, may be, create another one : the new URL, being considered a new article, would lose, the acquired weight of the previous one in terms of referrals, social trafic and so on. Or not ? What do you think is the best option ? Thanks for your expertise, Yves
On-Page Optimization | | yves678901 -
Multi Keyword URL Ranking at Number 1
Here is part of a URL that takes the local number 1 spot for "implant dentist glasgow" [website] /implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland/implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland.html The first /implant-dentistry-glasgow-scotland/ directory or page is protected and presumably just exists for ranking reasons. I am tempted to copy that URL on a client's implant page to compete for the keyword (I believe I have better content). Given that it works well for the other site, can you think of any reason that would that be a bad idea? Thanks very much.
On-Page Optimization | | neilmac0 -
Page authority still on 1 after url change and 301 redirect
Hi Moz analytics suggestion to help ranking is to have a keyword or phrase in the url so I advised a client to do this they changed one of their pages urls, this page previously had a page authority of 26 since the change its gone down to 1.
On-Page Optimization | | genkee
I advised them that they must do a 301 from the old page but they took a few weeks to do this, would this of affected it why is it not showing up yet its been 3 weeks now, since the 301 and 5 weeks since the url change.0 -
Keyword in URL: Ranking Factor?
I've got a site about a specific topic, which we'll call "themes" for the sake of this discussion. I personally like to keep the url structure short and clean (for usability purposes, but mainly because I'm a perfectionist and a minimalist). I feel that adding "themes" to the url structure is a bit redundant. However, nearly every keyword phrase that my site should rank for includes the word "themes." So I'm wondering how much I'm handicapping myself by not including the keyword "themes" in the url? The domain name itself sort of includes the keyword . . . although it's in Italian (I chose the domain for it's brand-ability, not for the keyword). A quick example: My Url Structure: www.themo.com/topic/abc My Competitor's Url Structure: www.sitesample.com/themes/topic/abc For many of the keywords, the competitors with the keyword in the url rank highest. But, I'm not sure how much emphasis to place on this, because from my understanding Google doesn't pay as much attention to url keywords anymore . . . and those sites might just be ranking high because they've been around for so long (which also happens to be the reason why they coincidentally also include the keyword in the url, because they started the site when that was a high ranking factor). Thoughts? Should I just trash my perfectionism and add the keyword to the url structure? (By the way, the site is only a couple months old and doesn't have any significant backlinks to inner pages yet, so changing the url structure wouldn't be a big deal if I decided to do that).
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Should I rewrite all my URLs ?
Hi all, I'm pretty new here and this is a question I'm struggling with since years ! All my URLs are very long. Years ago I wanted to put as many keywords as possible but today I'm not sure anymore it was such a good idea. Example: http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/album-groupe-Take_Me_To_Janus-nom_album-Ripping_the_Heart_from_the_Chest_of_the_Earth-l-en.html The problem is I have more than 300K of these pages. I'm afraid to create a huge mess even if I 301 them all to the new pages. What's your opinion ? Is it worth the effort ? Many thanks in advance for your precious help !
On-Page Optimization | | kivanSOM0 -
Can we listed URL on Website sitemap page which are blocked by Robots.txt
Hi, I need your help here. I have a website, and few pages are created for country specific. (www.example.com/uk). I have blocked many country specific pages from Robots.txt file. It is advisable to listed those urls (blocked by robots.txt) on my website sitemap. (html sitemap page) I really appreciate your help. Thanks, Nilay
On-Page Optimization | | Internet-Marketing-Profs0 -
Duplicate Content- Best Practise Usage of the canonical url
Canonical urls stop self competition - from duplicate content. So instead of a 2 pages with a rank of 5 out of 10, it is one page with a rank of 7 out of 10.
On-Page Optimization | | WMA
However what disadvantages come from using canonical urls. For example am I excluding some products like green widet, blue widget. I have a customer with 2 e-commerce websites(selling different manufacturers of a type jewellery). Both websites have massive duplicate content issues.
It is a hosted CMS system with very little SEO functionality, no plugins etc. The crawling report- comes back with 1000 of pages that are duplicates. It seems that almost every page on the website has a duplicate partner or more. The problem starts in that they have 2 categorys for each product type, instead of one category for each product type.
A wholesale category and a small pack category. So I have considered using a canonical url or de-optimizing the small pack category as I believe it receives less traffic than the whole category. On the original website I tried de- optimizing one of the pages that gets less traffic. I did this by changing the order of the meta title(keyword at the back, not front- by using small to start of with). I also removed content from the page. This helped a bit. Or I was thinking about just using a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic.
However what are the implications of this? What happens if some one searches for "small packs" of the product- will this no longer be indexed as a page. The next problem I have is the other 1000s of pages that are showing as duplicates. These are all the different products within the categories. The CMS does not have a front office that allows for canonical urls to be inserted. Instead it would have to be done going into the html of the pages. This would take ages. Another issue is that these product pages are not actually duplicate, but I think it is because they have such little content- that the rodger(seo moz crawler, and probably googles one too) cant tell the difference.
Also even if I did use the canonical url - what happened if people searched for the product by attributes(the variations of each product type)- like blue widget, black widget, brown widget. Would these all be excluded from Googles index.
On the one hand I want to get rid of the duplicate content, but I also want to have these pages included in the search. Perhaps I am taking too idealistic approach- trying to optimize a website for too many keywords. Should I just focus on the category keywords, and forget about product variations. Perhaps I look into Google Analytics, to determine the top landing pages, and which ones should be applied with a canonical. Also this website(hosted CMS) seems to have more duplicate content issues than I have seen with other e-commerce sites that I have applied SEO MOZ to On final related question. The first website has 2 landing pages- I think this is a techical issue. For example www.test.com and www.test.com/index. I realise I should use a canonical url on the page that gets less traffic. How do I determine this? (or should I just use the SEO MOZ Page rank tool?)0 -
Image URL's have knocked my sub-pages down (WP)
I had most of my keywords within the top 10 for this site, some were even ranking in the top 5. For a possible minor boost, more-so to cover all the bases, I decided to add images to all of the pages, and they were uploaded as a gallery with most of the image file names being the same as the keyword. Thus, url's were created with our targeted phrases, extending off of the corresponding sub-page. After that, Google quickly picked up the url's to the images and began indexing them, when that occurred the sub-page which was to be the landing page, quickly tanked. Nothing else on-site changed besides the uploading of the images, so I'm sure they're conflicting and for whatever reason Google can't decide which page to index. The page that contains the images used, or the actual intended landing page. With WP I didn't see a way to not have them link to anything at all, and just be static when using a gallery, stock at least. So, my question is how can I quickly alleviate this problem and what should I do in the future to avoid this? I believe if I change link thumbnails to image file instead of attachment page, that should fix the issue... Then, I'll have dead URL's which I suppose I should 301 to the sub-page. Alternatively, is there a better solution that will work, I was also thinking about no-indexing the attachment URL's, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320