Should I use canonical?
-
I'm working on a site that sells audio tracks, the site is a Wordpress build. I've got Yoast and XML Sitemaps running for SEO.
The site has been developed (not by myself) to use a flash based audio player. Now this player offers the ability to share, sell products etc... The player has been placed on the homepage and the main music catalog page.
The main catalog page has had a custom page type created for itself. This page has been created in such a way that if you visit the actual page from dashboard > Pages and add content then no content will appear on the page. Even the page header
is pulled from the PHP.
So really as far as I am aware no real content is being seen on the page by a search engine. Except the content on the side bars (it has 2 sidebars on either side of the page.)
The homepage has an introductory paragraph and header which are editable via the normal method in Wordpress.
A custom post type has been created specifically for music items. When a music item is uploaded it is added to the music item feed on the homepage and music catalog pages. It also creates a separate post for the item itself. These items at the moment also have 'no content' as they are only sidebars with a flash music player. I've started to add short paragraphs and headers to them so there is content on the music item posts. I cannot however, in the time frame/budget start entering deeply descriptive content about each item. (I considered adding the intro paragraph from the homepage and using a canonical tag to the homepage on every music item).
So here is my question. What do I do with these music items? Do I use canonical and point them toward the music catalog or the homepage? If so which one? I want the homepage or music catalog page to rank well and I am concerned that search engines aren't going to see these most vital parts of the site. I don't think individual items ranking is helpful, so what do i do?!?! The home and catalog pages are the two main pages of the site. I am going to advise a new player, page type etc... be utilised but at the moment I need a solution quickly.
Any help will be much appreciated.
-
The music item pages that are creating the mostly empty pages with sidebars are the ones that sound like they should be NoIndexed. Since they're essentially empty pages they would be duplicates of each other, thin content, and a canonical would be ignored because they aren't technically a duplicate of the homepage or a subset of the homepage's superset.
-
Thanks Mike, I appreciate the reply. Just to clarify, do you recommend we NoIndex the music item posts or the music catalog page?
I should have been clearer really, my idea was to add the canonical tag to the music items with the homepage as the link and use the homepages text content which is descriptive of the site overall, on each music item page along with a unique header and description. It still might not be beneficial, I just want to clear any duplicate content issues and help boost the two main pages of the site.
I'm also getting concerned that boosting the music catalog page is going to be difficult given that it's currently being eaten up by a flash based music player.
I assume that currently the only duplicate content the music items share with the homepage and music catalog page beside the sidebars will be whatever it strips off the music player (although the player itself is flash, it has elements that are not flash based).
So my new idea is to utilise the Schema Creator plugin on each item. They have a review system on the site and prices so it may make the individual music items stand out in search engines.
I will still need to add content on each item though. Now, I have no problem adding the content, but realistically there is only so much content you can write about each piece of music. I don't think this content will be sufficient without a sort of default paragraph for every post that is added on to its unique content. Hence why I thought of the homepage paragraph.
Again, any help will be much appreciated.
-
This sounds to me more like a NoIndex situation. Really you should be adding content to them but I can understand if its a lot of work and very tedious. A canonical wouldn't really make sense here... its thin content and the canonical would likely be ignored by Google. So instead I'd say NoIndex the pages for now.
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
-
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
How long does it take for canonical tags to work
How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer? We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though. Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much. FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Rel-canonical and meta data
Hey Mozzers, Help please. I am migrating content for a new website (1000's of pages) and am using the canonical tag on a number of pages. For the pages which I am asking Google not to recognise / index as the master version, and in the interests of time do I need to take the time to fill in the meta <title><description> etc each time?</p> <p>Ben</p></title>
Technical SEO | | Bendall0 -
John Mueller says don't use Schema as its not working yet but I get markup conflicts using Google Mark-up
I watched recently John Mueller's Google Webmaster Hangout [DEC 5th]. In hit he mentions to a member not to use Schema.org as it's not working quite yet but to use Google's own mark-up tool 'Structured Data Markup Helper'. Fine this I have done and one of the tags I've used is 'AUTHOR'. However if you use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool in GWMT you get an error saying the following Error: Page contains property "author" which is not part of the schema. Yet this is the tag generated by their own tool. Has anyone experienced this before? and if so what action did you take to rectify it and make it work. As it stands I'm considering just removing this tag altogether. Thanks David cqbsdbunpicv8s76dlddd1e8u4g
Technical SEO | | David-E-Carey0 -
Duplication, pagination and the canonical
Hi all, and thank you in advance for your assistance. We have an issue of paginated pages being seen as duplicates by pro.moz crawlers. The paginated pages do have duplicated by content, but are not duplicates of each other. Rather they pull through a summary of the product descriptions from other landing pages on the site. I was planing to use rel=canonical to deal with them, however I am concerned as the paginated pages are not identical to each other, but do feature their own set of duplicate content! We have a similar issue with pages that are not paginated but feature tabs that alter the URL parameters like so: ?st=BlueWidgets ?st=RedSocks ?st=Offers These are being seen as duplicates of the main URL, and again all feature duplicate content pulled from elsewhere in the site, but are not duplicates of each other. Would a canonical tag be suitable here? Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | .egg0 -
Anchor Text the best way to use it
Hi i am wanting to gain links to my site and make the links relevant and have seen many sites that do not have the keyword on their site and have been told as well as having the keywords in the image that they will also have anchor text from other sites. Can anyone please tell me the important of anchor text and how i should use it. Is it wise to build anchort text links within your own site and what other sites should you be looking for. I have used a few article sites to gain anchor text links but most of these are no follow which does not help me. any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Rel Canonical - Wordpress
How do you fix the rel canonical issue on a wordpress site? Is there a quick fix? I have a few notices on my site and am a little confused. Thanks, Jared
Technical SEO | | SaborStyle0 -
Does using parentheses affect the crawlers?
Quick question: if you using a parantheses around a keyword, do search bots still recognize the keyword? Fox ex: Welcome to a website about the National Basketball Association (NBA). Will the bots recognize that I'm trying to optimize to NBA and not (NBA)? Is this different for tags vs. actual body copy?
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics2