Canonicalization - Some advice needed :)
-
Hi guys,
To be honest, it's a little bit embarrassing to throw out this question but it's one of the weakest points of knowledge at the moment for me.
I've tried to get a grasp of canonical URLs and what it all means. From my understanding, it's informing Google which page to take into consideration when there's the possibility for duplicate content. Right?
However, with the site I'm working on I'm not sure if it would be worth putting site-wide and the impact it would have.
Site I'm working on - http://bit.ly/N7eew7
With the nature of the site, there would be a lot of duplicated content as there's the possibility that several properties listed could have a similar address due to being in the same building etc.
From what I can see, no canonical URL was setup on the homepage.
The other variations of the homepage URL are 301 redirecting to thee http:/www. version.
Can someone explain it all to me in simple terms? Honestly believe that I'm getting more confused by the minute.
Thanks guys for your patience
-
Seems like Matt and Marcus have you on the right track. With a real-estate site, duplicates and near-duplicates are very common, since you're adding and removing properties all the time and there are many search options and categories. I do agree that search-friendly URLs, long-term, where each property has a fixed URL, are definitely the best bet. In the meantime, though, a solid canonical structure helps a lot.
Ease into it - don't go sitewide in one fell swoop without a plan, unless you're having clear ranking problems. Start with your biggest problem areas, monitor/measure, and work from there. You can always check for indexed duplicates by running a Google search like:
site:daft.ie intitle:"176 Rathgar Road"
In this case, I'm not seeing any index issues, although I think Matt's concerns are valid.
I'd also consider rel=prev/next for search results pages, as that can help focus Google, too. Again, take it one step at a time and start with the biggest problems. It'll mitigate your risk all around.
-
What's everyones opinion canonicali URL being setup site-wide?
-
Hey, as per the email, it is exactly as above.
We can check the two versions of the URLs.
Confirm they both have the same canonical URL
then check both URLs using the info:URL command in Google to verify that in both instances, with and without final slash, the URL returned as indexed includes the final slash as per the canonical.
Any problems, give me a shout!
Marcus -
Hi Marcus thanks for your help so far. I've emailed you my URL's for a better look at the issue I'm facing.
-
Hi Antonio,
I hope you're well and not pulling your hair out in frustration just yet.
There are a few factors that you need to consider before making a decision on this:
1. Would changing the URL of the post give more traffic through the search engine than you are currently getting?
2. How would this impact the existing links that have been built to the original URL.
Remember that if you are going to change the URL of a page, this will just look like a new webpage to Google. All of the Facebook likes, Google+ +1's, links, etc will be going to the previous URL. Not only that, if you do a 301 redirect to the new URL, you will only transfer some of the link juice that you have made.
URL changes really should be a last resort and need to be thought out properly at the start of the webpage creation. In the case of Mark (above), I have recommended that he change the URLs because they are all dynamic and the benefit of changing these pages vs not, wins.
Let me know the URL of the page in question and I will take a look and tell you what I think.
Matt.
-
Hello Mathew and Mark congrats for the great support and highlights.
In the light of what you are explaning here could you please supoport me in this question concerning Canonical or 301 redirect? My issue is in terms of SEO when doing canolical.
I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines for the length names so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO.
This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115
My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me?
1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical. The duplicate content would still exist!
2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice.
I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name.
Thank you very much for the help,
Antonio
-
Hi Matthew,
Thanks very much for your explanation. I think I get to understand it better now
Many thanks,
Christian
-
Will do - cheers Matthew
I'll probably take you up on that offer.
-
No problem.
I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.
Matt.
-
Hi Matthew, thanks for chipping in.
At the moment we do have canonical URLs setup for property listings such as the example you given above.
We'll still be going ahead with cleaning up the URL structure and ensuring categories following the correct practice as well.
-
Hi Christian,
No, this wouldn't be the case because what you are telling Google there is that "http://www.example.co.uk/properties/search" is the EXACT SAME page as the "/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail/" page.
For the likes of just search pages, you don't need to have canonical URLs because they are just dynamically generated search pages. Where you DO NEED canonical URLs is on the likes of category pages, product pages, etc.
So, in the case of Mark's website, the individual property listing pages (e.g, http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606) need to have a canonical link because you could get to this page that has the EXACT SAME content with a similar URL (i don't know another URL to give the example here but a made up example could be http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606keyword=dublin).
This is why you should have search engine friendly URLs to make it easy to understand which page is which. So having http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/ as the URL instead of http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606 can make life a lot easier.
Has this helped to clear things up a bit?
Matt.
-
Hard to tell for 100% without the proper URLs but I don't think so.
You have one page that works on two different URLs. The page has a canonical tag showing that the http://www.mysite.com/product-a/ is the correct version.
So, in Googles eyes:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-aAre both pointing to:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
Due to the tag:
<link < span="">href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" /> </link <>
There could be a bit more to this picture, if you don't want to post a link on here drop me an email to [email protected] and ill double check for you.
In an ideal world I would want consistency between URL's, site links and trailing slashes. I.E. If the page resolves on:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a
But is canonicalised to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
I would want a 301 from
http://www.mysite.com/product-a
to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
and all internal links to point to
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
That's probably made it more confusing but in essence, nope, I think you are fine.
Cheers
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus
So here's what I've done...
So I've navigated like so:
Campaign>Crawl Diagnostics>Errors (68)>Duplicate Page Content Errors (61)Once this page loads all of the links, I've clicked on one of the links and it shows
1 Error
X Duplicate Page Content
Read MoreClicked on Read More then on the number 2 link that shows under the heading of Other URLs
This displays my two urls:
http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-aWhen I navigate to this page and view the source code I can see the following code:
href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" />So I'm confused, do I have a duplicate content problem or not?
NB If I remove the trailing slash from my url it will show the same page. It does not do a redirect to the url with the slash. (I've highlighted this to Hubspot and they have said that it is not a problem?)
-
I don't believe that SEOMoz reports cover canonicalised links.
Simple test:
- Grab one page that has duplicate problems according to the report
- grab all duplicates from the spreadsheet
- Check the canonical on all
Mark - this is the same problem you will run into that I was trying to highlight above.
Marcus
-
I'm trialling seoMoz at the moment and so far I have 61 duplicate content crawl errors showing in one of my campaigns. This has sent me running to my CMS provider (Hubspot) to query this.
They've advised me that they automatically sort out canonicalisation.So I'm left in a state of not knowing where to focus.
Are Hubspot wrong or are the seoMoz reports broken?
-
Hi Christian,
That's a really good question - Can anyone shed any light on this one?
Personally I would have made the URL you mentioned be the canonical one.
But seeing I'm here asking for advice on it, maybe someone else would be better placed to help.
-
Well, you know, my dear old mother used to say an ounce of SEO prevention is worth a pound of SEO cure. Catch you later Mark.
-
Hi Mark and Marcus,
Sorry for jumping in your discussion; if i have URLs like below:
/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial
/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail
does this mean that my canonical will be:
?
Many thanks for your help.
~Christian
-
Thanks Marcus - Agreed
Once URL structure has been improved, I will look into ensuring that specific property pages have canonical URLs and all relevant categories are appropriate setup as well.
Quite a bit of work to do but it should be worth it in the long term for the business.
-
Hi Mark,
No problem.
Yes, you are correct to assume that. For each of the property listings you would need to do this (just like the example that Marcus has given below).
I think that all areas of the website should really conform to these search engine friendly URLs. It may take quite a bit of time, but it will help you avoid a lot of issues in the future (which I can guarantee you would have).
Matt.
-
Yep, for sure, just beware it may still report duplication problems after you add the canonical URL so you will need to give it a manual once over. This is 100% worth doing though.
Marcus
-
Hi Marcus,
Just problems with the Moz tools.
We haven't been affected at all by any algorithm changes so far.
I still think it would be best to follow best practice going forward. I've just began work on this site and want to get to the root of any underlying problems.
Cheers,
Mark
-
Hey Mark
Are you having real world issues or just problems within the Moz tools?
I have feeling they don't factor canonicalisation at the moment (which sucks a bit) so you will do well to export the report to a spreadsheet and check them off manually.
Glad it was helpful!
Marcus
-
Marcus, thank you for giving such clear examples to me. It's a great help.
I'm a little bit embarrassed by the fact that it was causing such confusion up until now but it's clear to me now what needs to be changed.
With SEOMoz Campaign setup for the site, we have been receiving many duplicate content errors.
Hopefully the use of correct canonical URLs should help to eliminate many of the problems we have been having.
-
Hi Matt,
Thanks for the advice
Optimization of the URL structure is certainly something which I'm focusing on at the moment.
Taking on-board what you have mentioned, with the URL structure replaced, I presume that similar canonicals would need to be setup on each property listing to avoid duplicate content?
Do you think it's an issue which I should look into for other areas of the site as well?
Apologies for my questions. As you can guess, I'm trying to get to the root of any issues we're having with duplicate content.
Many thanks,
Mark
-
Hey Mark
In simple terms, the canonical URL exists as a suggestion to Google that a page may have various URLs or that various URLs may contain similar or near duplicate content.
For instance:
Lets say we have a list of properties in Birmingham, UK and that we have 3 pages showing that list of properties - the first by date order, the second by price high to low, the third by price low to high.
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=hightolow
- http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php?sort=lowtohigh
This is a perfect time to use the canonical URL as the content is the same, it is just jiggled around a little so all of these would set the default page as the canonical.
default page: http://www.example.co.uk/birmingham/properties.php
So, all pages would have this tag:
Then, Google knows that from a search and indexation perspective, they can return the one main version of this page and the others are just the same thing jumbled around a bit.
This is also a good, solid overview with a video and a basic explanation:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Mark,
I hope you're well.
Basically, the canonical tag is used to let Google know which URL it should refer to as the original source of the page content. So, if you had the following URLs that all go to the homepage:
www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/home/Then Google could crawl each of these pages and identify them as three different pages all with the same content. This could say to them that there is duplicate content on the site (which is not good). Usually with the homepage Google is intelligent enough to understand that there is just one page and the /index.php for example isn't a duplicate.
The problem that you do face, especially on the site that you are optimising, is with the different pages that have information on the lettings, etc (i.e. your product pages). For example, if you look at the following URL on your website:
http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606
This is when you go through to the short-term searches and then I find the '176 Rathgar Road' apartment. Due to the dynamically generated URL (search.shortterm.daft?id=23606) I can gather that there would be several ways to get to this page with a different URL. My first suggestion would be to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs, for example, instead of having 'http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606', it would be:
http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/
This way you could clearly optimise the page on Google search and have the canonical link to the page as:
href="http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment.html" rel="canonical" />
This would improve the SEO performance on the website and avoid duplicate content issues.
I hope this helps, but if you need any more info then just let me know.
Matt.
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
-
Need Advice: How should we handle this situation?
Hi Folks, We have a blog post on one of our sites that ranked very highly for lucrative term for about a period of two months. It had over 2000 Facebook likes, about 20 tweets and the same amount of Google +1's. The post ended up receiving several high quality natural links, and we also pointed a few authoritative links to it from our network of sites. After we saw the ranking starting to slip we did a bit of link building (which we shouldn't have done) and ended up making a big mistake. The link building company was only supposed to do 30 links and they ended up doing 600. Once we figured it out, we immediately submitted a disavow request and told Google about our mistake. I also thought maybe we then had a manual spam penalty applied so I also submitted a reconsideration request (and also told them about our mistake) but got back a canned reply saying "no manual penalties" were found. After we did all that, we saw the rankings fall out of the top 50 with the next 10 days. I'm confident we can throw up a new similar blog post and see close the same rankings we experienced with the original post. But before I do that, I have two questions: Should we 301 the old post to the new post? Could that some how "pass" the bad rankings along to the new post? What should we do about the natural links we received? Should we try and reach out to the sites and get them to change their links to the new post? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shawn810 -
Meta title Tag dilemma.... need help
Hey, Guys I have a dilemma that I cannot figure out how to solve. One thing that I have learned is that the meta tag is probably one of the most important factors of SEO. I work in the industry of real estate and we are located in a mid-sized market, Augusta, GA, which does not have a hugely competitive digital marketplace. So, I have told my web developer the changes that I want her to make to our major sub-domain pages on our website. I am anticipating that once she makes these changes which will allow me to make the necessary SEO changes to website, that we will see some good results. I have one dilemma that I can't figure out how to solve with the meta title tag. Check out our rental section: http://aubenrealty.com/rentals.cfm Now, click on any rental property and it will take you to that rental's page. Notice the page title " Auben Realty- real estate....." This is identical for every active and non-active property on our website. Every time we create a new property, this is what it spits out. Now, take it a step further and click on " Contact me about this property," and you will see the same page title. My dilemma is, " How do we fix this?" My assumption is that the best page title would be the address for each property( ex, 1322 Laurel Street, Augusta Ga 30904), right ? Is this some kind of simple coding adjustment?
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
How different does content need to be to avoid a duplicate content penalty?
I'm implementing landing pages that are optimized for specific keywords. Some of them are substantially the same as another page (perhaps 10-15 words different). Are the landing pages likely to be identified by search engines as duplicate content? How different do two pages need to be to avoid the duplicate penalty?
Technical SEO | | WayneBlankenbeckler0 -
Need help optimizing Windows IIS server for SEO
My web site, www.nhfinehomes.com, is running on IIS7 and I did read a great post on SEOMoz.org regarding how to optimize IIS for SEO in particular, redirecting URL's to lowercase properly. However, I lack the technical skills to do this and am looking for someone who has done this before that can consult on this. Can anyone help or recommend a consultant with actual, IIS SEO experience?
Technical SEO | | LinkMoser0 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0 -
Help needed regarding managing client expectations - tricky situation
I will try to explain the scenario as quickly as possible and my hope is that someone can share their opinion on how they would move forward. I was introduced to a local business owner who said he wanted help with SEO. Upon looking at his current online marketing, I saw he had 2 current sites promoting the same local business (martial arts instruction / classes). Why he had two sites? He said it made it easier for him to dominate in Google. Red Flag #1. Upon doing a quick site audit, I found a ton of problems with the existing site. Black text on a black background, keyword stuffing in title tags, non-canonicalization, no xml sitemap, no Google analytics installed...on and on. In addition, the site did not really have a good look to it graphically. I told him that I recommend a fresh new site using Wordpress and that we should build the content with the focus on explaining the benefits of the classes. He agreed and we began development of a new Wordpress site from the ground up. We built a sitemap, wireframe, nice design, etc. The site looks much better and we got rid of a lot of the technical problems with the site. The problem is this: Even though the new site is technically better based on On Page analysis, it is not showing up anywhere in the Top for localized keywords. The site has been live for about 2 1/2 months (March 1). I made the mistake of telling him that in a lot of cases in the past, I was able to build a new site for other clients that would rank well for localized searches based on On Page optimization alone. This is not happening for him with the new site. The new domain is relatively new (less than a year old) and has no links at all at this point. I recommended that we do a 301 redirect from his existing domain to the new one but he is skeptical and I almost can't blame him. The client is not paying me to do any SEO. The contract was to build a new site that would be built with best SEO On Page practices (Title Tags, Header Tags, Meta Desc., XML Sitemap, canonicalization, etc.) I hesitate to post the links to his existing site and the new one we built but I can see where that may shed some more light on the subject. If interested in taking a look, please send me a message. I guess the two questions are this: 1. Is it reasonable for a site to rank well for a localized non-competitive term based on A scores of on page analysis? 2. What harm or foul is there in doing a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new one and then reverting back if he decides that the move hurt his rankings more than helped? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | bluelynxmarketing0 -
Wordpress site, combine Blog without hurting SEO - Need Expert Advice
Hi, I come from the old html days of Frontpage and then moved to Dreamweaver. I first worked with Wordpress at version 2.7 and was not all that impressed, but then recently I worked in the new version and was extremely impressed. So my knowledge of Wordpress is VERY limited and plan to build future sites with it. I need to know the best way to solve an issue for a customer. The client is http://www.nextgenrestoration.com/ Site was built years ago with Frontpage. The popularity of Blogs was hot so someone told them that if they add new content it would be better to use a blog, so they added a blog. So you have the following: www.nextgenrestoration.com (main site) then they installed wordpress in a folder (blog) www.nextgenrestoration.com/blog Original person that built the site quit. New person took over and said the main site needed to changed to Wordpress because they did not have Frontpage and all they knew was Wordpress. Main site was converted to Wordpress. They wanted to keep the original design so they did not use a stock template, they just built it with their design. I guess from looking at the Editor, they manually went in and put the design in to match. Now.. this last month, the person that had changed
Technical SEO | | Force7
the site to Wordpress quit. So I got involved because the new person they hired could not add content to the main website. If you add a page, it does not show up, you have to manually go in the php and add the link to the category. The new person knows how to use Wordpress but she knows nothing about PHP so is lost when it comes to manually adding content to the site. Here was my Thoughts. The main site needs to be rebuilt in a stock template so it automatically creates new pages, blog posts. I have to make sure that if we change the
main website that we could keep all the same links and page names. The girl
that built the site, if you hover over the links that she put it under ‘florida’,
that must be a category. But we would need to keep the same page names. I know
we could do a 301 redirect but this guy cannot lose traffic. He is already down
in hits after the last Panda update. My thought was, rebuild the main site in a stock template so
someone can actually add content easily to the site. Also build a new blog
section so it all matches. (personally the existing design looks old and dated and needs updating) If you look at the site now. The blog looks totally
different and it is not helping if a customer comes to the blog but cannot see
the navigation for the whole site. My thought was to just leave the old blog, it has a LOT of backlinks. But just add a new blog to the main site and all new content goes there. The old blog would stay just make sure we did build in some call to action so it sends them to the main site. Also, we found we cannot create a Blog on the
wordpress we have installed in the main directory. I am guessing because it
wants to name it /blog? I want to be sure we give this client the best advice on what to do without
hurting his existing seo and traffic. As you can tell, I am not qualified to really give the best advice since I am so new to Wordpress. This is a small company that really needs some help. Thanks in advance for your time! Force70 -
Help with domain redirect advice please!
I run the website http://buildyourjacket.com. We have other domains as well, most importantly www.buildyourjacket.com and cvcsports.com. If you Google "letterman jackets" (our primary search term) cvcsports.com shows up as the first result (yay!). But that is not what we want. Until a few weeks ago, Google would show http://buildyourjacket.com as the domain for the first search result from "letterman jackets". But then a few weeks that changed. I don't know how that could have happened. There are two reasons why we want the domain http://buildyourjacket.com to be the one that shows up: 1) It's a better sounding/looking domain and 2) When it was showing up, Google also showed right below the domain another link of our that said "Build Your Own Jacket" which definitely helped us get more clicks. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do? Thank you so much.
Technical SEO | | BrandonDoyle0