Non-Canonical Pages still Indexed. Is this normal?
-
I have a website that contains some products and the old structure of the URL's was definitely not optimal for SEO purposes. So I created new SEO friendly URL's on my site and decided that I would use the canonical tags to transfer all the weight of the old URL's to the New URL's and ensure that the old ones would not show up in the SERP's. Problem is this has not quite worked. I implemented the canonical tags about a month ago but I am still seeing the old URL's indexed in Google and I am noticing that the cache date of these pages was only about a week ago.
This leads me to believe that the spiders have been to the pages and seen the new canonical tags but are not following them. Is this normal behavior and if so, can somebody explain to me why?
I know I could have just 301 redirected these old URL's to the new ones but the process I would need to go through to have that done is much more of a battle than to just add the canonical tags and I felt that the canonical tags would have done the job. Needless to say the client is not too happy right now and insists that I should have just used the 301's. In this case the client appears to be correct but I do not quite understand why my canonical tags did not work.
Examples Below-
Old Pages:
www.awebsite.com/something/something/productid.3254235
New Pages:
www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name
Canonical tag on both pages:
rel="canonical" href="http://www.awebsite.com/something/something/keyword-rich-product-name"/> Thanks guys for the help on this.
-
It can take a while. I disagree very slightly with Alan and EGOL on one point - while 301s are traditionally more appropriate here, I often find that canonicals are pretty strong (and more than a hint). Both suffer the same problem, though - the signal has to be crawled and processed, and that doesn't always take right away. I haven't seen any reports on it taking 2, 3, etc. times to happen, but I've definitely seen a page re-cache without the indexation signals beign honored.
Are these true duplicates or did something change in the interim a bit? If the duplicates don't seem like true duplicates or you put 1000s of them out there all at once, Google could choose to ignore the canonicals.
If these really seem stuck, though, switching to 301s is harmless, and for a permanent URL change, it is probably the better way to go. I wouldn't expect that to kick in instantly either, though.
-
Yes... I agree with Alan. Canonical is a hint.
We put rel=canonical on about 250 pages in early February. As of today about 1/2 of those pages are still in the SERPs. The numbers are falling but this is really really slow to implement.
If you have done everything correctly it will probably work but requires patience.
-
Alan, I appreciate the help. I will go with this and see what happens and try to find those videos. Graci.
-
Matt cutts has said it a few times in videos, i could not tell you what ones without doing a far bit of searching.
-
Yes they should, but 301's and canonicals leak link juice, so you want your links to go directly to the correct page where you can.
See half way down this page, you will see just how easy it is to do all this, with a few clicks.
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/microsoft-technologies-and-seo-web-development
for you it may not be quiest as easy as you are converting from id to product name, but if you look into the url rewrite module a bit further you will see it is posible to do this once for all pages
-
Also do you know of any documentation that states that it takes a few passes for a canonical tag to be honored and also for 301's as well? That would really help me explain my initial thoughts on using the canonical tag.
-
I get the part about the 301's and I believe we have iis7 but between departments, just not as simple of a change especially regarding the number of products I have to do this for, 800+.
Regarding the links to the old URL, it was my belief that with the canonical tag, that weight should transfer over to the the new URL as well or was I mistaken on that?
-
You seem to have done everything ok, but from my understanding google does not honer 301's or caninicals first crawl, they wait a few times to make sure its not a mistake.
What sort of server are you using? if you are using windows with iis7 is is very easy to impliment the urlrewites and corasponding 301's
i would 301, a canonical is a hint, a301 is a directive. and also if people stil go to your old pages, they may make a link to the old page rather then the new url.
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
-
Pages are Indexed but not Cached by Google. Why?
Hello, We have magento 2 extensions website mageants.com since 1 years google every 15 days cached my all pages but suddenly last 15 days my websites pages not cached by google showing me 404 error so go search console check error but din't find any error so I have cached manually fetch and render but still most of pages have same 404 error example page : - https://www.mageants.com/free-gift-for-magento-2.html error :- http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&rlz=1C1CHBD_enIN803IN804&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.mageants.com%2Ffree-gift-for-magento-2.html&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1569j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so have any one solutions for this issues
Technical SEO | | vikrantrathore0 -
Home Page Being Indexed / Referral URLs /
I have a few questions related to home page URLs being indexed, canonicalization, and GA reporting... 1. I can view the home page by typing in domain.com , domain.com/ and domain.com/index.htm There are no redirects and it's canonicalized to point to domain.com/index.htm -- how important is it to have redirects? I don't want unnecessary redirects or canonical tags, but I noticed the trailing slash can sometimes be typed in manually on other pages, sometimes not. 2. When I do a site search (site:domain.com), sometimes the HP shows up as "domain.com/", never "domain.com/index.htm" or "domain.com", and sometimes the HP doesn't show up period. This seems to change several times a day, sometimes within 15 minutes. I have no idea what is causing it and I don't know if it has anything to do with #1. In a perfect world, I would ask for the /index.htm to be dropped and redirected to .com/, and the canonical to point to .com/ 3. I've noticed in GA I see / , /index.htm, and a weird Google referral URL (/index.htm?referrer=https://www.google.com/) all showing up as top pages. I think the / and /index.htm is because I haven't setup a default URL in GA, but I'm not sure what would cause the referrer. I tracked back when the referrer URL started to show up in the top pages, and it was right around the time they moved over to https://, so I'm not sure what the best option is to remove that. I know this is a lot - I appreciate any insight anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | DigMS0 -
Why would Google not index all submitted pages?
On Google Search console we see that many of our submitted pages weren't indexed. What could be the reasons? | Web pages |
Technical SEO | | Leagoldberger
| 130,030 Submitted |
| 87,462 Indexed |0 -
How to know how much pages are indexed on Google?
I have a big site, there are a way to know what page are not indexed? I know that you can use site: but with a big site is a mess to check page by page. This is a tool or a system to check a entire site and automatically find non-indexed pages?
Technical SEO | | markovald0 -
Post Site Migration - thousands of indexed pages, 4 months after
Hi all, Believe me. I think I've already tried and googled for every possible question that I have. This one is very frustrating – I have the following old domain – fancydiamonds dot net. We built a new site – Leibish dot com and done everything by the book: Individual 301 redirects for all the pages. Change of address via the GWT. Trying to maintain and improve the old optimization and hierarchy. 4 months after the site migration – we still have to gain back more than 50% of our original organic traffic (17,000 vs. 35,500-50,000 The thing that strikes me the most that you can still find 2400 indexed pages on Google (they all have 301 redirects). And more than this – if you'll search for the old domain name on Google – fancydiamonds dot net you'll find the old domain! Something is not right here, but I have no explanation why these pages still exist. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | skifr0 -
Why are pages still showing in SERPs, despite being NOINDEXed for months?
We have thousands of pages we're trying to have de-indexed in Google for months now. They've all got . But they simply will not go away in the SERPs. Here is just one example.... http://bitly.com/VutCFiIf you search this URL in Google, you will see that it is indexed, yet it's had for many months. This is just one example for thousands of pages, that will not get de-indexed. Am I missing something here? Does it have to do with using content="none" instead of content="noindex, follow"? Any help is very much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MadeLoud0 -
Getting More Pages Indexed
We have a large E-commerce site (magento based) and have submitted sitemap files for several million pages within Webmaster tools. The number of indexed pages seems to fluctuate, but currently there is less than 300,000 pages indexed out of 4 million submitted. How can we get the number of indexed pages to be higher? Changing the settings on the crawl rate and resubmitting site maps doesn't seem to have an effect on the number of pages indexed. Am I correct in assuming that most individual product pages just don't carry enough link juice to be considered important enough yet by Google to be indexed? Let me know if there are any suggestions or tips for getting more pages indexed. syGtx.png
Technical SEO | | Mattchstick0 -
Duplicate content issue index.html vs non index.html
Hi I have an issue. In my client's profile, I found that the "index.html" are mostly authoritative than non "index.html", and I found that www. version is more authoritative than non www. The problem is that I find the opposite situation where non "index.html" are more authoritative than "index.html" or non www more authoritative than www. My logic would tell me to still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html". Am I right? and in the case I find the opposite happening, does it matter if I still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html"? The same question for www vs non www versions? Thank you
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0