How accurate and quick does Google pick up on canonical tags?
-
Hey Peeps!
I was just wondering what your experiences are in how fast Google will pick up on canonical tags and how often they use the 'strong hint' in stead of leaving it be?
I'm based in The Netherlands and for websites with a decent amount of content and links (where Google indexes new content quickly) they pick up on it within 1-2 weeks.
So far they've ignored some canonical tags on one of my websites. Perhaps that's because they don't agree with the degree in which the pages are similar.
Thanks in advance!
-
Oh yes... a touch larger than 10k. Big touch too
Some we've been able to 301, however it is mostly a faceted search issues on the site we are working on - so those pages need to stay live to users.
-
Thanks for your response Mat! How big is a big site in your case? 10.000+ pages?
Is there any way you could use 301-redirects instead of canonical tags? Honestly, when I get the chance to use a 301-redirect (when the page I'm trying to de-indexed is not usefull for a user) I choose to use a 301-redirect.
-
Honestly Billy, I do not remember precisely. I noticed it like 4 weeks back. I think it was something like a WordPress category page which was created some DC. When I do remember or when I see it again I'll let you know!
-
It can be slow - particularly on a big site that is crawled slowly. We've got an over-sized site thanks to some iffy CMS logic that we are trying to get Google to follow canonical instructions on. It's happening slowly, but is taking months.
-
Would you care to share those pages? This is not an issue I have ever had and you have sparked my curiosity.
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
-
Increase in duplicate page titles due to canonical tag issue
Implemented canonical tag (months back) in product pages to avoid duplicate content issue. But Google picks up the URL variations and increases duplicate page title errors in Search Console. Original URL: www.example.com/first-product-name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 1: www.example.com/first-product--name-123456 Canonical tag: Variation 2: www.example.com/first-product-name-sync-123456 Canonical tag: Kindly advice the right solution to fix the issue.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDdigital0 -
Tags and Categories Ranking
Hello A few times I have come across tags and categories ranking for some relevant search terms. This seems strange as all category and tag pages would have 0 external links back to them - whereas pretty much every other page on the site would have external links. In most cases thy seem to rank along with the page, for example: for the search term "voiceover recording xxxxx" The voice over recording page will rank, followed by a similar tag page... If I make the tag links 'nofollow' would that help stop this? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Hreflang Tags with Errors in Google Webmaster Tools
Hello, Google Webmaster tools is giving me errors with Hreflang tags that I can't seem to figure out... I've double checked everything: all the alternate and canonical tags, everything seems to match yet Google finds errors. Can anyone help? International Targeting | Language > 'fr' - no return tags
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GlobeCar
URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'fr' that do not have return tags.
Status: 7/10/15
24 Hreflang Tags with Errors Please see attached pictures for more info... Thanks, Karim KQgb3Pn0 -
Canonical URL Tag
I have 3 websites with same content, I want to add Canonical tag to my main website. Is this also important to mentioned other duplicate URL in canonical tag in main website? or just need to just add
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marknorman0 -
We are ignored by Google - what should we do?
Hi, We believe that our website - https://en.greatfire.org - is being all but ignored by Google Search. The following two examples illustrate our case. 1. Searching for “China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve”. This is the title of a blog post that we wrote which received some 50,000 visits. On Yahoo and Bing search, we rank first for this search. On Google, however, we rank 7th. Each of the six pages ranking higher than us are quoting and linking to our story. 2. Searching for “Online Censorship In China”. This is the title of our front page. Yahoo and Bing both rank us third for this search. On Google, however, we are not even among the first 300 results. Two of the pages among the first 10 results link to us. Our website has an average of around 1000 visits per day. We are quoted in and linked from virtually all Western mainstream media (see https://en.greatfire.org/press). Yet to this day we are receiving almost no traffic from Google Search. Our mission is to bring transparency to online censorship in China. If people could find us in Google, it would greatly help to spread awareness of the extent of Internet restrictions here. If you could indicate to us what the cause of our poor rankings could be, we would be very grateful. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GreatFire.org0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0 -
Getting a site to rank in both google.com and google.co.uk
I have a client who runs a yacht delivery company. He gets business from the US and the UK but due to the nature of his business, he isn't really based anywhere except in the middle of the ocean somewhere! His site is hosted in the US, and it's a .com. I haven't set any geographical targeting in webmaster tools either. We're starting to get some rankings in google US, but very little in google UK. It's a small site anyway, and he'd prefer not to have too much content on the site saying he's UK based as he's not really based anywhere. Any ideas on how best to approach this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PerchDigital0