Canonical tag help

[shaz_lhr]

Hi,

We have a product which is marketed by affiliates . Affiliates send referrals to our sale page by adding their affiliate IDs to our product page like http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345.

We want to avoid the content duplication impression to Google by using canonical tags but we are not clear about its use.

Should we use it on http://www.mysite.com/products.php ( actual page) or we should create temporary pages for each referral id  i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref= 12345 and then add canonical tags to all those pages linking to proper page i.e http://www.mysite.com/products.php ?

Thanks,

shaz

[shaz_lhr]

Thanks Peter, I've added those urls to canonical tags which are actually being viewed by users i.e simple-url from above mentioned rewrite rule . So now same url is being used both for user and search engine bots

[Dr-Pete]

Be careful changing your sitewide URL structure, but if you're going to show users the "url-with-extension" version, make that canonical. It's dangerous to use one version for users and another for search, and people will start linking to the one they see.

I'd also 301-redirect the rewrite (add "[R=301]" to the end of the rewrite rule) and link to it internally. If you have one "canonical" version for bots and another for visitors, you'll end up with a mess.

[shaz_lhr]

Hi,

I've written some rewrite rules in htaccess file to make url names more readable like

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.)(simple-url)$
RewriteRule (.)$ url-with-extension.php

Should i specify the "simple-url" or "url-with-extension.php" (urls from above example) in canonical tag as proper url ?

Thanks,

shaz

[shaz_lhr]

Thanks Peter for the explanation. We only have ref ID so we should be fine by adding canonical tag to only products.php.

All of you have been really helpful.

Regards,

shahzad

[Keszi]

Thank you Dr. Pete

[Dr-Pete]

I want to expand on what I think Istvan was trying to say. First, the canonical on "products.php" will consolidate all of the affiliate IDs. That should be a perfectly valid solution here.

The only warning is whether you have other IDs on that page that drive different product views. If it's just one single product page, then the canonical is great here. If, however, you have something like:

http://www.mysite.com/products.php?prod=1&ref=12345

http://www.mysite.com/products.php?prod=2&ref=12345

...where "prod=" (or something like it) represents separate products, then a canonical tag to "/products.php" would collapse ALL of your product pages into one. That's certainly not what you want. So, it does depend a lot on the details. In that case, the "?prod=1", etc. version would actually be the canonical version (you'd have to set the tag dynamically).

[shaz_lhr]

Yes, the parameter is there only to track the affiliate

Thanks,

shaz

[DougRoberts]

But you'd still want to add a rel=canonical on the products.php page so that all "versions" that get indexed with a referrer parameter are pointing to the vanilla products.php as the canonical version?

[marcinlejman]

Hi,

I'm afraid your answer is not entirely correct.

Let me quote directly from the source:

"If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. Our algorithms select the page we think best answers the user's query. Now, however, users can specify a canonical page to search engines by adding a **** element with the attribute rel="canonical" to the **** section of the non-canonical version of the page. Adding this link and attribute lets site owners identify sets of identical content and suggest to Google: "Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results."

[Keszi]

Hi Shaz,

When you are loading http://www.mysite.com/products.php?ref=12345, you are basically loading http://www.mysite.com/products.php.

In order to resolve the duplicate content issue for each product page you could insert a canonical pointing to itself OR you could eliminate the duplicates by adding the affiliate parameters into Google Webmaster Tools -> Site Configuration -> URL parameters. This way you will tell Google what that specific parameter is.

Or you could use both (if it is a large website, it is advised to do so).

I hope that helped,

Istvan

[ClickConsult]

Hi Shaz,

I'm guessing the parameter displays no alternative content, it's simply there for tracking, right?

If so, the canonical tag should simply be added to http://www.mysite.com/products.php

You can also set how you want Google to interact with parameters via Google Webmaster Tools.

Good luck!