Use Canonical or Robots.txt for Map View URL without Backlink Potential
-
I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions:
-
Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL
-
Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?
-
-
Thank you!
-
Sounds good! Glad to hear you got a solution sorted. Will be interested to hear how it goes.
-
thx for the feedback. I created a "/map/" folder in the URL and added to robots.txt. Again, they are simply a "Map view" option for users and has no or limited unique content, and no plans of changing that since the main page has all the unique content and indexed.
-
Hi there,
Unless the pages contain a lot of crossover duplicate content, there's a good chance Google might ignore the canonical tag anyway:
"One test is to imagine you don’t understand the language of the content—if you placed the duplicate side-by-side with the canonical, does a very large percentage of the words of the duplicate page appear on the canonical page? If you need to speak the language to understand that the pages are similar; for example, if they’re only topically similar but not extremely close in exact words, the canonical designation might be disregarded by search engines."
However, I wouldn't be able to make a strong case for noindexing the pages, unless you're sure they're not adding any value to users. Are these pages discovered by users in organic search (a landing pages report can help you isolate this)? If so, what's the user experience looking like? If users aren't finding their way to this page organically from search or direct (indicating they've bookmarked it), then you potentially could make a case for noindexing them. If they are reaching them as a landing page, you might want to think twice about noindexing.
An alternative would be to build out these pages more, so they standalone as unique, good quality content.
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
-
Disallowed "Search" results with robots.txt and Sessions dropped
Hi
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Frankie-BTDublin
I've started working on our website and I've found millions of "Search" URL's which I don't think should be getting crawled & indexed (e.g. .../search/?q=brown&prefn1=brand&prefv1=C.P. COMPANY|AERIN|NIKE|Vintage Playing Cards|BIALETTI|EMMA PAKE|QUILTS OF DENMARK|JOHN ATKINSON|STANCE|ISABEL MARANT ÉTOILE|AMIRI|CLOON KEEN|SAMSONITE|MCQ|DANSE LENTE|GAYNOR|EZCARAY|ARGOSY|BIANCA|CRAFTHOUSE|ETON). I tried to disallow them on the Robots.txt file, but our Sessions dropped about 10% and our Average Position on Search Console dropped 4-5 positions over 1 week. Looks like over 50 Million URL's have been blocked, and all of them look like all of them are like the example above and aren't getting any traffic to the site. I've allowed them again, and we're starting to recover. We've been fixing problems with getting the site crawled properly (Sitemaps weren't added correctly, products blocked from spiders on Categories pages, canonical pages being blocked from Crawlers in robots.txt) and I'm thinking Google were doing us a favour and using these pages to crawl the product pages as it was the best/only way of accessing them. Should I be blocking these "Search" URL's, or is there a better way about going about it??? I can't see any value from these pages except Google using them to crawl the site.0 -
Hreflang Tags & Canonicals Being Used
We have a site on which both hreflang tags and canonicals are being used. There are multiple languages, but for this I'll explain our problem using two. There are a ton of dupe page titles coming up in GSC, and we're not sure if we have an issue or not. First, the hreflang tags are implement properly. UK page pointing there, US page pointing there. Further down the page, there are canonical tags - except the UK canonical tag points to the UK page, and the US version points to the US page. I'm not sure if this will cause an issue in terms of SEO or indexing. Has anyone experienced this before or does anything have any insight into this? Thanks much! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Snaptech_Marketing0 -
Intra-linking to pages with a different Canonical url ?
Hello Moz Community! I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate. Scenario: Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry. Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site). Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes' Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term. The Issue / Question: Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/ The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category? OR Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ray-pp0 -
If I own a .com url and also have the same url with .net, .info, .org, will I want to point them to the .com IP address?
I have a domain, for example, mydomain.com and I purchased mydomain.net, mydomain.info, and mydomain.org. Should I point the host @ to the IP where the .com is hosted in wpengine? I am not doing anything with the .org, .info, .net domains. I simply purchased them to prevent competitors from buying the domains.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlittman0 -
Removing Canonical Links
We implemented rel=canonical as we decided to paginate our pages. We then ran some testing and on the whole pagination did not work out so we removed all on-page pagination. Now, internally when I click for example a link for Widgets I get the /widgets.php but searching through Google I get to /widgets.php?page=all . There are not redirects in place at the moment. The '?page=all' page has been rated 'A' by the SEOmoz tool under On Page Optimization reports and performs much better than the exact same page without the '?page=all' (the score dips to a 'D' grade) so need to tread carefully so we don't lose the link value. Can anyone advise us on the best way forward? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jannkuzel0 -
New server update + wrong robots.txt = lost SERP rankings
Over the weekend, we updated our store to a new server. Before the switch, we had a robots.txt file on the new server that disallowed its contents from being indexed (we didn't want duplicate pages from both old and new servers). When we finally made the switch, we somehow forgot to remove that robots.txt file, so the new pages weren't indexed. We quickly put our good robots.txt in place, and we submitted a request for a re-crawl of the site. The problem is that many of our search rankings have changed. We were ranking #2 for some keywords, and now we're not showing up at all. Is there anything we can do? Google Webmaster Tools says that the next crawl could take up to weeks! Any suggestions will be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 9Studios0 -
Canonical Problems
Hi Guys, There is so much info out there about canonical issues and 301 redirects I'm not sure what to do about my problem. Google webmaster says I have over 2000 duplicate page titles. Google is showing most of my pages in duplicate or triplicate url format. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fasctimseo/store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE/
/store/LOVE_OIL_CARIBBEAN_ROSE
/store/love_oil_caribbean_rose/Im using x-cart pro as my cart.When I look at the source code I see each one having a rel=canonical tag with the exact urls you see above. Can someone give me an example of a redirect that I can put in my .htaccess file that would work site wide?I obviously cant go through and 301 this on a page by page basis. It would take a year.Thank You Tim
0 -
Redirecting my new Website URL to my old Website URL
Hi! OK, I am semi - new to SEO Moz but have been self-teaching for 3 years. However I am stuck.. I have been operating my e-commerce site from www.shopadornonline.com for the past 3 years. I just purchased www.shopadorn.com Right now Shopadorn.com re-directs to www.shopadornonline.com because all my products and links go to shopadornonline.com/productblahblahblah I guess I am stuck. Not sure what to tell my web designer to do? Do I give up on having shopadorn.com OR do I start re-directing customers and doing 301 re-directs? I think from what i have read that it is bad to have traffic going to both shopadorn and shopadornonline as they compete for rankings? Where should I start?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shopadorn0