Canonical
-
i have some static webpages in root and wordpress installed in subdirectory , Canonical tag for the whole website was with trailing slash , i stripped the HTML extensions for static webpages but i can't force to add trailing slash to the static webpages so i changed the canonical for html webpages from http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles.html/ to http://ghadaalsaman.com/articles but the Wordpress" http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/ " still with trailing slash , when i've checked my google webmasters i found that my indexed pages dropped down 100 page !
what should i put in the canonical for the static pages? i tried to strip the slash from wordpress but i failed , so my static webpages canonical with no trailing slash and wordpress with trailing slash .
-
Thanks Dana , can you help me with redirecting non trailing slash to trailing slash at the end , my wordpress is in sub dictionary http://domain.com/blog/
and i have two .htaccess , one in root and one in the wordpress folder.
i tried to solve it by adding that code in the root .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://ghadaalsaman.com/blog/$1/ [L,R=301]Wordpress give 200 OK with the two versions ( with and without trailing slash ) and that hurts my SEO
Thanks in advanced -
Completely agreed with Dana on this. I recently helped a startup fixing this problem by setting a redirect rule in their nginx configuration to redirect all the URLs with trailing slash to desired version. PFB the required rule if you're using nginx:
rewrite ^/(.*)/$ /$1 permanent;
If you're on LAMP/MAMP/WAMP tech stack, find the apace equivalent of this rule and place it in your apache config file. Hope that helps!
-
Hi there,
Every time I get into the "trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash" discussion with my clients I go back and read this excellent post in the Official Google Webmasters Central Blog by Maile Ohye: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Problem for SEO: Both URLs are producing 200 OKAY status codes, resulting in duplicate content. This can interefere with crawl efficiency and fragments link equity.
Solution: Ideally, rather than relying on canonical tags to achieve what you want, 301-redirect the non-preferred versions of your URLs to the preferred version. Only one URL should return a 200 OKAY status code. The other should 301-redirect. This is a better solution than relying on canonical tags.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Duplicate content and rel canonicals?
Hi. I have a question relating to 2 sites that I manage with regards to duplicate content. These are 2 separate companies but the content is off a data base from the one(in other words the same). In terms of the rel canonical, how would we do this so that google does not penalise either site but can also have the content to crawl for both or is this just a dream?
Technical SEO | | ProsperoDigital0 -
When to use mod rewrite / canonical / 301 redirect
Hello, I have taken over the management of a site which has a big problem with duplicate content. The duplicate content is caused by two things: Upper and lower case urls e.g: www.mysite.com/blog and www.mysite.com/Blog The other reason is the use of product filters / pagination which mean you can get to the same 'page' via different filters. The filters generate separate URLs. http://www.mysite.com/casestudy
Technical SEO | | Barques-Design
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy/filter?solution=0&page=1
http://www.mysite.com/casestudy?page=1
http://www.cpio.co.uk/casestudy/filter?solution=0" Am I right to assume that for the case sensitive URLs I should use a 301 redirect because I only want the lower page to be shown? For the issue with dynamic URLs should we implement a mod-rewrite and 301 to one page? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Mat0 -
Canonicals
We have a client that has his products listed on 20+ different websites, including 4 of his own. Also, he only has 1 of everything, so once he sells it then the product is gone. To battle this duplication issue, plus having a short internet lifespan of less than 4 weeks, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to canonical the products back to the category page. Kind of like using canonical tags on your "used blue widget" and "used red widget" pages back to the "used widgets" page. Would this help with the duplicate content issues? Is this a proper use of a canonical?
Technical SEO | | WhoWuddaThunk0 -
Rel Canonical question
Hi: I got a report indication 17 rel canonical notices. What does this mean in simple language and how do i go about fixing things?
Technical SEO | | Shaaps0 -
Rel=Canonical Header Location
Hello, I've been trying to get our rel=canonical issues sorted out. A fellow named Ayaz very kindly pointed out that I'm trying to put the code into the wysisyg editor, but this might not be the best place to put the code. We are using Drupal 6. Where do I insert the code? head> <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"> Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Canonical tags/wordpress permalink question
Need help: Do canonical tags do the exact same thing that wordpress already does with it’s permalink function? Or are these 2 separate things? thank you.
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO1 -
Rel=Canonical being ignored?
Hi all, We have a toys website that has several categories. It's setup such that each product has a primary category amongst the categories within it can be found. For example... Addendum's primary url is http://www.brightminds.co.uk/childrens-toys/board-games/addendum.htm but it can also be found here http://www.brightminds.co.uk/learning-toys/maths-learning/addendum.htm. Hence, in the for that url it has a rel=canonical that points to the first url. For some reason though seomoz ignores this and reports duplicate page content. It doesn't seem to record the canonical tag either. Any ideas what's going on? Thanks, Josh.
Technical SEO | | joshgeake_gmail.com0 -
Syndication: Link back vs. Rel Canonical
For content syndication, let's say I have the choice of (1) a link back or (2) a cross domain rel canonical to the original page, which one would you choose and why? (I'm trying to pick the best option to save dev time!) I'm also curious to know what would be the difference in SERPs between the link back & the canonical solution for the original publisher and for sydication partners? (I would prefer not having the syndication partners disappeared entirely from SERPs, I just want to make sure I'm first!) A side question: What's the difference in real life between the Google source attribution tag & the cross domain rel canonical tag? Thanks! PS: Don't know if it helps but note that we can syndicate 1 article to multiple syndication partners (It would't be impossible to see 1 article syndicated to 50 partners)
Technical SEO | | raywatson0