Change Google's version of Canonical link
-
Hi
My website has millions of URLs and some of the URLs have duplicate versions. We did not set canonical all these years. Now we wanted to implement it and fix all the technical SEO issues.
I wanted to consolidate and redirect all the variations of a URL to the highest pageview version and use that as the canonical because all of these variations have the same content.
While doing this, I found in Google search console that Google has already selected another variation of URL as canonical and not the highest pageview version.
My questions:
-
I have millions of URLs for which I have to do 301 and set canonical. How can I find all the canonical URLs that Google has autoselected? Search Console has a daily quota of 100 or something.
-
Is it possible to override Google's version of Canonical? Meaning, if I set a variation as Canonical and it is different than what Google has already selected, will it change overtime in Search Console?
-
Should I just do a 301 to highest pageview variation of the URL and not set canonicals at all? This way the canonical that Google auto selected might get redirected to the highest pageview variation of the URL.
Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated.
-
-
Hi Gaston!
Thanks for getting back to me and answering all my questions. I will work on getting the Canonical live and then wait to see how Google reacts before doing the redirects.
Best regards,
A -
Hi there!
I hear you, had some simililar issues with big sites that i've worked with.
I would go with the "highest page viewed" page to be the canonical, you should select the one that you consider serves users with the best experience or match their search intent. That said, i'll answer your questions:
- No, there is way to get that many URLs from Search Console. Through API the most I could ever get was arround 200k URLs.
- It's not that hard as "overriding" the actual canonical page selected by google... You should tell Google wich is your preferred canonical page, then G will decide whether to use it or not.
- Is always wise to go first with a canonical, so you can analyze how google reacts with that change. Then wait a little time, a few weeks and if everything went as planned set redirections.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
Should I Add Location to ALL of My Client's URLs?
Hi Mozzers, My first Moz post! Yay! I'm excited to join the squad 🙂 My client is a full service entertainment company serving the Washington DC Metro area (DC, MD & VA) and offers a host of services for those wishing to throw events/parties. Think DJs for weddings, cool photo booths, ballroom lighting etc. I'm wondering what the right URL structure should be. I've noticed that some of our competitors do put DC area keywords in their URLs, but with the moves of SERPs to focus a lot more on quality over keyword density, I'm wondering if we should focus on location based keywords in traditional areas on page (e.g. title tags, headers, metas, content etc) instead of having keywords in the URLs alongside the traditional areas I just mentioned. So, on every product related page should we do something like: example.com/weddings/planners-washington-dc-md-va
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdrama231
example.com/weddings/djs-washington-dc-md-va
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting-washington-dc-md-va OR example.com/weddings/planners
example.com/weddings/djs
example.com/weddings/ballroom-lighting In both cases, we'd put the necessary location based keywords in the proper places on-page. If we follow the location-in-URL tactic, we'd use DC area terms in all subsequent product page URLs as well. Essentially, every page outside of the home page would have a location in it. Thoughts? Thank you!!0 -
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
Base href + relative link href for canonical link
I have a site that in the head section we specify a base href being the domain with a trailing slash and a canonical link href being the relative link to the domain. <base <="" span="">href="http://www.domain.com/" /> href="link-to-page.html" rel="canonical" /> I know that Google recommends using an absolute path as a canonical link but is specifying a base href with a relative canonical link the same thing or is it still seen as duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16116990439410 -
Does a non-canonical URL pass link juice?
Our site received a great link from URL A, which was syndicated to URL B. But URL B is canonicalized to URL A. Does the link on URL B pass juice to my site? (See image below for a visual representation of my question) zgbzqBy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice1 -
Should canonical links be included or excluded in a sitemap?
Our company is in the process of updating our sitemap. Should we include or exclude canonical links.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Will blocking google and SE's from indexing images hurt SEO?
Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James770 -
Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
What is the average % of links from a sitemap that are included in the Google index? Obviously want to aim for 100% of the sitemap urls to be indexed, is this realistic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stats440