Rel="canonical" again
-
Hello everyone,
I should rel="canonical" my 2 languages website /en urls to the original version without /en. Can I do this from the header.php? Should I rel="canonical" each /en page (eg. en/contatti, en/pagina) separately or can I do all from the general before the website title?
Thanks if someone can help.
-
So, if I understood, my code to have in the header.php of the website should be:
hope im right :)
-
NetLogiQ Thank you.
This answer solves a lot of tricks i had in my head
Thank you very much, I will better study the link you sent, and try to implement on my website. Footers etc. are not translated, so they remain in the original language.. But while reading, I think the solution can fit to my problem.
Thanks again!
Eugenio
-
Hi,
As I see it, you don't need to use a rel="Canonical" because your pages are not duplicates. You have content in italian and translated content in English.
The only thing you need to do is add a rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
This is what Google recommends in case your website is fully translated.
Some example scenarios where
rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
is recommended: For example, you have both German and English versions of each page. Here is how you implement it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en1. Add a HTML link in the header - section for example:
2. HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL: Link: <http: www.yourwebsite.eg="" en="">; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en".</http:>
-
hello james
Thanks for reply. I have original webpages in Italian. Translated webpages are in English. I use a plugin for wordpress, that allows me to translate the whole page (title, etc.) except the url, which will only be different because of the /en before the original page name (in italian, eg /en/contatti)
Widgets, footers etc. are still in Italian, even with translated pages.
I also thought about changing permalinks to be %postname%, so that url may adapt to title (? I think). But Im afraid this website wide urls change will affect my current rankings.
Any suggestion?
-
This is a response to both questions. Rel = canonical will give in this case the English page the authority, that should be the page that ranks well.
The main issue here is if the whole page is translated don't use a canonical tag, if the content stays in English and the Navigation/footer is changed use canonical tag to the English page as this would verge on duplicate content.
-
in fact, now that im thinking:
will not canonical confuse google if trying to rank also for the other language?
What will appear? this is duplicate in a sense, but is complete different content in the other sense.
Please correct me if im wrong..
-
this is what google replied to the same question, not very explicit at all!
"Canonical was not created to say that a language is another language, but that a duplicate page is just a variation and not the original page"
Im lost again but i also now think that rel canonical is the solution..
-
Just to add in here and simplify the process, Wordpress has a built in function to return the current post/page URL. Make use of 'get_permalink()', with some simply string manipulation you would be able to output the correct canonical tag to your page.
Edit: My PHP is a little rusty at times, but the following should sort you out:
//Check if the page you're on is a single post. If so run below.
if ( is_single() ) {
$url = get_permalink();
$canonical = str_replace('/en', '', $url);echo '';
};
?>As mentioned above, put this into your header.php file (in the template directory), where you would like the canonical tag to appear.
-
He isn't trying to redirect he does want both pages.
Also canonical sitewide is problematic unless you add a customized conditional at the PHP level. He has a wordpress site and can't edit the raw HTML of every page so he needs to have a PHP string at the global level which changes based on page variables.
-
Hello,
1. Do not add a canonical sitewide tag - here is a case study on why http://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization Long story short - he deindexed 57% of his website.
2. You could 301 redirect all the pages, instead of adding a rel canonical. If your /en version is a duplicate of the original version, then you could simply add a code that redirects each page to the relevant version, like this: RedirectMatch 301 ^/en/(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.en/$1
You can use that solution in the case where you have a website called www.mywebsite.com that has a www.mywebsite.com/en version for a lot of links if not all, and those are the ones indexed in Google. You just add that code into htaccess. So just replace mywebsite with your website.
-
I don't want to post the same answer as I did to your previous question but perhaps there was further clarification that you needed, that I missed!
Put a conditional in the header. Since you are using a wordpress platform you can't go in and manually edit each pages canonical anyway. Using the page if function and a variable you would be able to assign each one it's own rel= from a central head file anyway.
In an ideal situation you'd do each page manually but because of your CMS you need to do a work around
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
-
Rel: Canonical - checking advice provided by SEO agency
Hey all, We have two brands one bigger and one smaller that are on 2 different domains. We are wanting to repost some of the articles from the smaller brand to the bigger brand and what was a bit of curve ball, our SEO agency advised us NOT to put a rel: canonical on the reposted articles on the bigger brands site. This is counter to what i'm used to and just wanted to confirm with the gurus out there if this is good advice or bad advice. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Page with "random" content
Hi, I'm creating a page of 300+ in the near future, on which the content basicly will be unique as it can be. However, upon every refresh, also coming from a search engine refferer, i want the actual content such as listing 12 business to be displayed random upon every hit. So basicly we got 300+ nearby pages with unique content, and the overview of those "listings" as i might say, are being displayed randomly. Ive build an extensive script and i disabled any caching for PHP files in specific these pages, it works. But what about google? The content of the pages will still be as it is, it is more of the listings that are shuffled randomly to give every business listing a fair shot at a click and so on. Anyone experience with this? Ive tried a few things in the past, like a "Last update PHP Month" in the title which sometimes is'nt picked up very well.
Technical SEO | | Vanderlindemedia0 -
Rel canonical between mirrored domains
Hi all & happy new near! I'm new to SEO and could do with a spot of advice: I have a site that has several domains that mirror it (not good, I know...) So www.site.com, www.site.edu.sg, www.othersite.com all serve up the same content. I was planning to use rel="canonical" to avoid the duplication but I have a concern: Currently several of these mirrors rank - one, the .com ranks #1 on local google search for some useful keywords. the .edu.sg also shows up as #9 for a dirrerent page. In some cases I have multiple mirrors showing up on a specific serp. I would LIKE to rel canonical everything to the local edu.sg domain since this is most representative of the fact that the site is for a school in Singapore but...
Technical SEO | | AlexSG
-The .com is listed in DMOZ (this used to be important) and none of the volunteers there ever respoded to requests to update it to the .edu.sg
-The .com ranks higher than the com.sg page for non-local search so I am guessing google has some kind of algorithm to mark down obviosly local domains in other geographic locations Any opinions on this? Should I rel canonical the .com to the .edu.sg or vice versa? I appreciate any advice or opinion before I pull the trigger and end up shooting myself in the foot! Best regards from Singapore!0 -
How Does Google's "index" find the location of pages in the "page directory" to return?
This is my understanding of how Google's search works, and I am unsure about one thing in specific: Google continuously crawls websites and stores each page it finds (let's call it "page directory") Google's "page directory" is a cache so it isn't the "live" version of the page Google has separate storage called "the index" which contains all the keywords searched. These keywords in "the index" point to the pages in the "page directory" that contain the same keywords. When someone searches a keyword, that keyword is accessed in the "index" and returns all relevant pages in the "page directory" These returned pages are given ranks based on the algorithm The one part I'm unsure of is how Google's "index" knows the location of relevant pages in the "page directory". The keyword entries in the "index" point to the "page directory" somehow. I'm thinking each page has a url in the "page directory", and the entries in the "index" contain these urls. Since Google's "page directory" is a cache, would the urls be the same as the live website (and would the keywords in the "index" point to these urls)? For example if webpage is found at wwww.website.com/page1, would the "page directory" store this page under that url in Google's cache? The reason I want to discuss this is to know the effects of changing a pages url by understanding how the search process works better.
Technical SEO | | reidsteven750 -
Job/Blog Pages and rel=canonical
Hi, I know there are several questions and articles concerning the rel=canonical on SEOmoz, but I didn't find the answer I was looking for... We have some job pages, URLs are: /jobs and then jobs/2, jobs/3 etc.. Our blog pages follow the same: /blog, /blog2, /blog/3... Our CMS is self-produced, and every job/blog-page has the same title tag. According to SEOmoz (and the Webmaster Tools), we have a lots of duplicate title tags because of this problem. If we put the rel=canonical on each page's source code, the title tag problem will be solved for google, right? Because they will just display the /job and /blog main page. That would be great because we dont want 40 blog pages in the index. My concern (a stupid question, but I am not sure): if we put the rel=canonical on the pages, does google crawl them and index our job links? We want to keep our rankings for our job offers on pages 2-xxx. More simple: will we find our job offers on jobs/2, jobs/3... in google, if these pages have the rel=canonical on them? AND ONE MORE: does the SEOmoz bot also follow the rel=canonical and then reduce the number of duplicate title-tags in the campaigns??? Thanx........
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Google +1 not recognizing rel-canonical
So I have a few pages with the same content just with a different URL. http://nadelectronics.com/products/made-for-ipod/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System http://nadelectronics.com/products/speakers/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System http://nadelectronics.com/products/digital-music/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System All pages rel-canonical to:
Technical SEO | | kevin4803
http://nadelectronics.com/products/made-for-ipod/VISO-1-iPod-Music-System My question is... why can't google + (or facebook and twitter for that matter) consolidate all these pages +1. So if the first two had 5 +1 and the rel-canonical page had 5 +1's. It would be nice for all pages to display 15 +1's not 5 on each. It's my understanding that Google +1 will gives the juice to the correct page. So why not display all the +1's at the same time. Hope that makes sense.0 -
Effect of rel canonical on links
Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page? For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?
Technical SEO | | Burgo0 -
How to set up a rel canonical in big commmerce?
I have no clue how to set this up in the Bigcommerce store platform
Technical SEO | | Firestarter-SEO0