Deos canonicalisation work across directories?
-
Hi everyone,
I'm new to the group and can't find this question answered anywhere else.
I have a dynamic site that we aim to rewrite the URLs removing parameters and making it easier for the engines to index us and users to recall URLs.
The issue that worries me relates to canonical tags. If I put a canonical tag on a directory..
http://www.abc.com/spain (index page)
and then point all variations of that page to the index page will it stop/pass juice for those pages at the next directory level to the index page rather than properly index and rank those pages appropriately. ie.
http://www.abc.com/spain/Malaga.html will it pass any link juice I have for the second level to the first level?
It concerns me that it will as I had a conversation with someone who lost all visibility on her site and it turned out to be the canonical tag on the home page that was causing it.
Thanks in anticipation
-
Peter is correct below. I think you are heading in the wrong direction. After your explanation here, I understand a little more about where you are going. Here is what I would say to your question:
1. All "old urls" (and all versions of) will need to have a 301 redirect to the new SEo friendly url. The currency is a different issue. You cant redirect that because you would never be able to show multiple currencies to the right users. In the curreny example, you could use a canonical tag to the most popular or default currency.
2. Directories and IA (information architecture) of your site have nothing to do with redirects or canonical tags. As Peter pointed out below, /spain/malaga is a totally different page than /spain. You dont do anything special with tags here, you just create unique content for each of those pages. You pass proper link juice upwards by internally linking your /spain/malaga page up to your /spain page, and every other page that exists below a main level directory page. Essentially, you want all deeper pages linking up to your main directory page.
3. In the small cases that you will be using the canonical tag, you put those tags on all the pages except the original page.
Hope that clears things up. I was/am still a bit confused as to your structure, but think this should get you in the right direction.
-
Sorry, I'm still confused (read your reply to Ryan, who asked some good questions). The canonical, like a 301-redirect will consolidate link-juice, but only for the pages it's on and preferably only for actual duplicates.
If you put a canonical tag at the "/Spain" level, it doesn't impact "/Spain/Malaga.html" at all. It just makes sure that any stray inbound links to "/Spain" duplicates (like "/Spain?print=true") have their link-juice consolidated and don't show up in the index.
If you could give a couple of sample tags and how you're looking to use them, maybe we could dig in deeper. I feel like I'm missing something still.
-
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for the response. I have to say I'm impressed at the speed!
Hmmm, there is a bit of both going to be happening. We are restructuring some of the dynamic pages to present user and search engine friendly URLs. I understand we will need to be putting in place redirects for those pages, so far so good. We have, for example, pages were each one can have a parameter for each currency. I understand we would merely redirect every parameter version to the original page under the new user friendly URL?
We are then creating specific SEO landing pages for dedicated keywords per page. The URLs in here will be structured in directories. What I am confused about relates to differing levels of directory. If we put in a canonical tag on the top level will it direct all rank and link juice to that level, so Spain/ would benefit from the links to spain/malaga ?? Or would each level hold its own link juice spreading to links out and not the other way? I just don't want to pass link juice 'up' the chain so to speak due to a canonical tag.
Finally, and this may answer my question. If I have two pages that I want a tag to pass the link juice to one of them...do I place the tag on both pages and indicate on both tags the URL of the main page? If that is correct then I understand that the directory issue I am worried about won't exist because I will only put canonical tags on the one directory level.
Hope this isn't too long!
Thanks
Andy
-
Not sure why you want to use the canonical tag in this instance. If http://www.abc.com/spain/Malaga.html is truly a duplicate or replicated page of the new /spain page, then I guess you could do it. But it sounds to me like you are re-structuring your urls to be more friendly, and if that is the case you will want to permanently 301 redirect the old urls to the new SEO friendly one. That will pass on the SEO juice in a more effective way then canonical a bunch of the old pages that you dont want anyway.
Is that the case? It kind of depends on the content of each of the pages, and how that content interacts with the other pages. Typically canonical is used for paginated instances or duplicated content that is handle in a different matter, not redirecting juice from old urls/pages to new ones.
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
-
Inner pages of a directory site wont index
I have a business directory site thats been around a long time but has always been split into two parts, a subdomain and the main domain. The subdomain has been used for listings for years but just recently Ive opened up the main domain and started adding listings there. The problem is that none of the listing pages seem to be betting indexed in Google. The main domain is indexed as is the category page and all its pages below that eg /category/travel but the actual business listing pages below that will not index. I can however get them to index if I request Google to crawl them in search console. A few other things: I have nothing blocked in the robots.txt file The site has a DA over 50 and a decent amount of backlinks There is a sitemap setup also any ideas?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Exact keyword in domain - does it work
Hi, a hypothetical question: let's say there is a fresh domain travelnorway.com (of course there is already domain like that, I am using it just as a example) Will it rank first on googe for "travel norway" query on google?( I mean in situation where 30 other companies are trying to rank for the same phrase) Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeszekNowakowski0 -
Canonicalisation and Dynamic Pages
We have an e-commerce single page app hosted at https://www.whichledlight.com and part of this site is our search results page (http://www.whichledlight.com/t/gu10-led-bulbs?fitting_eq=GU10). To narrow down products on the results we make heavy use of query parameters. From an SEO perspective we are telling GoogleBot to not index pages that include these query parameters to prevent duplicate content issues and to not index pages where the combination of query parameters has resulted in no results being returned. The only exception to this is the page parameter. We are posting here to check our homework so to speak. Does the above sound sensible? Although we have told GoogleBot to not index these pages, Moz will still crawl them (to the best of my knowledge), so we will continue to see crawl errors within our Moz reports where in fact these issues don't exist. Is this true? Is there anyway to make Moz ignore pages with certain query parameters? Any other suggestions to improve the SEO of our results pages is most appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TrueluxGroup0 -
Do 301s still work after hosting is discontinued?
I am in the process of phasing out a website that has been acquired by another company. Its web pages are being 301 redirected to their counterparts on the website of the company that has acquired them. How long should I maintain the hosting of the phased out website? Technically, do 301s still work after the hosting has been discontinued? Thanks, Caro
Technical SEO | | Caro-O0 -
Will manually autotagging my adwors campaign work?
Good Morning from 17°C Mostly Cloudy Humidity: 85% Wetherby Uk 🙂 For reasons too arduous to detail autotagging my ppc ads is not working in that Google analytics ppc data is missing:-( To fix this I've gone down ther route of manually autotagging the my ppc campaigns by adding this onto the end of the campaign urls - www.aldermedia.co.uk/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={keyword}&utm_campaign=Aldermedia My question "But will adding curly brackets around the work keyword as in {keyword} dynamically record the different keywords used and show in analytis?" Below is a screenshot of the situation: http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/manually-autotagging-campaigns-screenshotcopy.jpg I have disabled autotagging in the ppc dashboard to allow for autotagiing to work but ultimately I want to see some ppc data in the campaigns section of Google analytics and I really want to know what paid terms visitors entered. Hope this all makes some sense, please take a look at the above screenshot to help. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Change name of directory
How can I best change the name of a directory on my website (example: http://www.website.com/nameofdirectory/)? The directory has lots of content included in it which has links from all over my website. I guess I have to adjust those links? How do I easily collect all of the links? Which is the code I should use in my htacces? Thank you! With kind regards,
Technical SEO | | wellnesswooz
Dieter0 -
Web config redirects not working where a trailing slash is involved
I'm having real trouble with getting working redirects in place to use on a site we're re-launching with a modified url structure. Old URL: http://www.example.com/example_folder/ New URL: http://www.example.com/example-of-new-folder/ Now, where the old URL's have a trailing slash the web.config simply will not accept it. It says the URL can start with a slash, but not end with a slash. However, many of my URL's do end with a slash so I need a workaround. These are the rules I'm putting in place: <location path="example_folder/"></location> Thanks
Technical SEO | | AndrewAkesson0 -
Used SEOMOZ top 100 Directories, my site ranking lowered, what can we do to fix this?
We have made a big mistake.... So what can we do to fix this? A trainee member of staff has used the seomoz 100 top directories and added to sites from PR10 to PR6 approx about 25 sites, using keywords were possible instead of using the website URL "which i now was stupid!. Our website ranking have been lowered big time for all keywords used!, eg from 1st to 10th and even disappeared from the top 100 We are contacting all directories asking for the Title link to be changed to the URL instead of a keyword.. Will this help? I understand that Google give sites a penalty for this!!, but what can i do to put this right and how long would this penalty last for? Any advice would be highly appreciated... Thanks Dean
Technical SEO | | deanpallatt0