What is the best approach for formatting Canonical links on a search engine style website? At the minute our search engine fetches results and paginates them. We currently set the Canonical URL paginated pages back to the 1st page so:
Examples
http://jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london
Canonical = http://www.jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london
http://jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london/?&page=2
Canonical = http://www.jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london
Is this the best approach or should I be setting the Canonical URL to also include the &page=2?
I noticed that when I submitted the XML Sitemap only a small fraction of the pages were indexed.
Thanks
Oliver
Only use canonical for pages/URLs with (almost) identical content. Your pagination pages clearly have different content.
Related
So, I have been building an ecommerce site for a small company.
The url structure is : www.example.com/product_category/product_name and the site has around 1000 products.
I've checked google webmaster tools and in the HTML improvements section it shows that I have multiple title and meta description tags for all the product pages. They all appear two times, both:
-www.example.com/product_category/product_name
and
-www.example.com/product_category/product_name/ (with slash in the end)
got indexed as separate pages.
I've added a 301 redirect from every www.example.com/product_category/product_name/ to www.example.com/product_category/product_name, but this was almost two weeks ago. I have resubmitted my sitemap and asked google to fetch the whole page a few times. Nothing has changed, GWT still shows the pages as duplicate tags.
I did not get any manual action message.
So I have two questions:
-how can I accelerate the reindexation process, if it's possible?
-and do these tags hurt my organic search results? I've googled it, yes and some say it does and some say it doesn't.
An option is to set a canonical link on both URLs (with and without /) using the URL without a /. Little by little, Google will stop complaining. Keep in mind Google Webmaster Tools is slow to react, especially when you don't have much traffic or backlinks.
And yes, duplicate tags can influence your rankings negatively because users won't have proper and specific information for each page.
Set a canonical link on both Urls is a solution but it take time from my experience.
The fasted way is to block old URL in robots.txt file.
Disallow: /old_url
canonical tag is option but why you are not adding different title and description for all pages.
you can add dynamic meta tags one time and it will create automatically for all pages so we dont worry about duplication.
Currently BigCommerce does a pretty good job at defining the canonical link for pages. But I am looking to update the behaviour for product list pages and remove the page number out of the link.
Currently it behaves as /category/?page=1, /category/?page2, and so on. I wish to elimate the page number completely and simple use /category
I prefer that search engines view all these pages as a single page as it is just the same data that is indexed from other places.
Currently the page defines the canonical link in the header as:
%%Page.CanonicalLink%%
I am looking to see if anyone has encountered this problem and is looking for a solution.
Thanks
A theory question here,
If I've got a paginated section on my website and the URL is
website.com/news
this page has multiple pages.
Should I automatically redirect visitors on /news to /news/page/1
If i leave it as both /news and /news/page/1 this will be duplicated content according to Google. Or is Google smart enough to tell if its the first page?
Whats the best practice to solve this?
You just need to tag yout pages correctly so that Google understands this is paginated content and won't penalize you for duplicate content.
Tag your pagination links with rel="next", and rel="prev", then rel="canonical" each paginated page to the full non-paginated version. For real users of course you do not redirect to non-paginated content ever.
If you do this Google will treat each paginated page as if it were one giant non-paginated page.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
My website has about 200 useful articles. Because the website has an internal search function with lots of parameters, the search engines end up spidering urls with all possible permutations of additional parameters such as tags, search phrases, versions, dates etc. Most of these pages are simply a list of search results with some snippets of the original articles.
According to Google's Webmaster-tools Google spidered only about 150 of the 200 entries in the xml sitemap. It looks as if Google has not yet seen all of the content years after it went online.
I plan to add a few "Disallow:" lines to robots.txt so that the search engines no longer spiders those dynamic urls. In addition I plan to disable some url parameters in the Webmaster-tools "website configuration" --> "url parameter" section.
Will that improve or hurt my current SEO ranking? It will look as if my website is losing thousands of content pages.
This is exactly what canonical URLs are for. If one page (e.g. article) can be reached by more then one URL then you need to specify the primary URL using a canonical URL. This prevents duplicate content issues and tells Google which URL to display in their search results.
So do not block any of your articles and you don't need to enter any parameters, either. Just use canonical URLs and you'll be fine.
As nn4l pointed out, canonical is not a good solution for search pages.
The first thing you should do is have search results pages include a robots meta tag saying noindex. This will help get them removed from your index and let Google focus on your real content. Google should slowly remove them as they get re-crawled.
Other measures:
In GWMT tell Google to ignore all those search parameters. Just a band aid but may help speed up the recovery.
Don't block the search page in the robots.txt file as this will block the robots from crawling and cleanly removing those pages already indexed. Wait till your index is clear before doing a full block like that.
Your search system must be based on links (a tags) or GET based forms and not POST based forms. This is why they got indexed. Switching them to POST based forms should stop robots from trying to index those pages in the first place. JavaScript or AJAX is another way to do it.
Google has been pushing its new canonical link feature, I agree it is really useful. Now instead of having a ton of entry points in to an area you can have one entry.
I was wondering, does this feature play nice with paging?
For example: I have this page which has 8 pages of content, if I specify the canonical of http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for the page, will there be any undesired side effects? Will this be better overall? Will this mean that a hit on page 5 will take users to page 1?
When specifying a canonical URL, it should have substantially the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google were to honor your canonical link on page 5, it would send users to page 1.
You should use the canonical link on page 1 so that Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154 and http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=1&response_type=3 are the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata
You may also want to put canonical links on the other pages so Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5&response_type=3
You should only add canonical links on pages with identical content. For example, a set of links presented in a different order: sorted by date or alphabetically.
In your case all pages have different content (albeit representing several pages of the same article or conversation thread). Which means you don't need to canonicalize them.
Still if you do, all that happens is that Google gives more priority to the first page, rather than the other pages when displaying them in search results.
Canonical links do not affect your visitors. They only suggest priority and possible duplicate content to bots.
More info from Google here