Canonical and Sitemap issue
-
Hi all,
I was told that I could change my homepage Canonical tag to match that of my XML sitemap, this sitemap is being generated for me automatically and shows the homepage as e.g. https://www.mysite.com/index.html, yet my Canonical tag has been set to https://www.mysite.com.
Google currently shows as https://www.mysite.com/ being indexed, but https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results.
Can someone please tell me if I should change the Canonical to the index.html version, or if I should do nothing, or remove the Canonical tag altogether?
Thank you for looking.
-
I agree with the others. Given "https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results", in all likelihood it is being redirected to https://www.mysite.com (and should be). So you don't want to change the canonical to the index.html version of the page only to have it redirected back to https://www.mysite.com. It'll unnecessarily slow the site and might even create a loop.
-
Thank you both, I'll leave it as it is, I'm not able to edit the XML my side sadly.
-
Yes, that's a good point. Canonicals are suggestions for Google, not commands.
-
I see your point, and don't worry about it. Sitemaps help Google find all of your pages and can provide certain other information, but they are not required so no need to overthink them. In general Google is pretty good at finding what it needs to find. And it will certainly find your homepage.
-
I agree with Linda here, I would leave the canonical tag as is. It is a cleaner, better looking URL for the SERPs. If anything, manually update the XML file to reflect the canonical version of the homepage. The main purpose of the XML sitemap is to help search engines crawl and index a website. The homepage is going to be the most frequently crawled page so Google will not have a problem finding it.
Also, do not worry about Google disliking the canonical pointing to .com instead of /index.html. If Google determines that is not the ideal URL for it's index it will ignore the canonical tag.
-
Hi,
Thanks, basically I was concerned that Google may not like that https://www.mysite.com/ was not in the sitemap, yet index.html was and the canonical was pointing to https://www.mysite.com.
If that makes any sense....
-
What are you trying to achieve? Do you particularly want the index.html version to be the canonical? The https://www.mysite.com/ version is more straightforward and what most people would expect your homepage URL to be.
Unless there is some pressing reason to do otherwise, I'd leave it the way it is.
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
-
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
Hi there, We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category). Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place): Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward. Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change. Thank you! Joe
Web Design | | Joe_Stoffel1 -
Dead end pages are really an issue?
Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Sitemap Question - Very Old Ecommerce Site, Never Used A Map
I help manage a family website, that has about 10,000 products... It was top ranked since 1996, then got smacked by Penguin and recovered but its still receiving only a fraction of the natural traffic it used to get. Something we have never used... Is a sitemap. I'm curious if anyone knows reliable software that will generate a sitemap? My cart is custom built, website uses html pages across the board. Dynamic content and parameters are set up properly, onsite seo is in the excellent range. The only thing that I haven't been utilizing is a sitemap. Because the cart was hand built, it would a huge convenience to use a lightweight program thats compatible with any website, has parameter settings, exclusions and anything else useful to negate any duplicate content. I have a few highly dynamic pages as well... If anyone knows a product or a possible solution, it would be much appreciated. Working it up myself would be very time consuming. Thx
Web Design | | Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants0 -
Breadcrumbs show for some section and dont come for some. What could be the issue
Hello, We have implemented breadcrumbs - which comes up nicely for Blog and Forum in Google Search However, when we look at our 2 other section - New Car Product and Latest News - it does not comes up, is there any issue which can foresee Sample URL of New Car - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_newcar&view=product&Itemid=2&id=8&vid=188 Sample URL of News - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_latestnews&view=detail&n_id=474&Itemid=10 Its been over 1 month - since breadcrumbs been introduced in both New Car and News. is there any issue like in them as why is is not showing in search. Any recommendations Many Thanks !!
Web Design | | Modi0 -
Duplicate Content & Canonicals
I am a bit confused about canonicals and whether they are "working" properly on my site. In Webmaster Tools, I'm showing about 13,000 pages flagged for duplicate content, but nearly all of them are showing two pages, one URL as the root and a second with parameters. Case in point, these two are showing as duplicate content: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=3&product_style_id=8&frame_id=63&size=25x20 We have a canonical tag on each of the pages pointing to the one without the parameters. Pages with other parameters don't show as duplicates, just one root and one dupe per listing, So, am I not using the canonical tag properly? It is clearly listed as:Is the tag perhaps not formatted properly (I saw someone somewhere state that there needs to be a /> after the URL, but that seems rather picky for Google)?Suggestions?
Web Design | | sbaylor0 -
How will engines deal with duplicate head elements e.g. title or canonicals?
Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's. Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page. Example Head Tag: <title>Example Title - #1</title> <title>Example Title - #2</title> My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded. My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page. Is this a correct assumption? We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly. The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements. I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | PCampolo0 -
XML Sitemap that updates daily/weekly?
Hi, I have a sitemap on my site, that updates but it isn't a XML sitemap. See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/sitemap/ I have used some free software to crawl the site and create a sitemap of pages, however I think that if I were to upload the sitemap, it would be out of date as soon as I listed new products on the site, so would need to rerun it. Does anyone know how I can get this to refresh daily or weekly? Or any software that can do it? I have a web firm that are willing to do one, but our relationship is at an all time low and I don't want to hand over £200 for them to do one. Anyone with any ideas or advice? Thanks Will
Web Design | | WillBlackburn0 -
Has Anyone Had Issues With ASP.NET 4.0 URL Routing?
I'm seeing some odd results in my SEOMOZ results with a new site I just released that is using the ASP.NET 4.0 URL routing. I am seeing thousands(!) of duplicate results, for instance, because the crawl has uncovered something like this: http://www.mysite.com/
Web Design | | TroyCarlson
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx (so far, so good, though I wish it wouldn't show both)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/ (what the heck -?)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/about/ (WTF!?)
http://www.mysite.com/default.aspx/about/about/products/ (and on and on ad infinitum) I'm also seeing problems pop up in my sitemap because extensionless urls have an odd "eurl.axd/abunchofnumbersgohere" appended to the end of every address which is breaking links. sigh Buyer beware. I've found articles that discuss the "eurl.axd" issue here and there (this one seems very good), but nothing about the weird crawl issue I outlined above. Any advice?0