What if you can't navigate naturally to your canonicalized URL?
-
Assume this situation for a second...
Let's say you place a rel= canonical tag on a page and point to the original/authentic URL. Now, let's say that that original/authentic URL is also populated into your XML sitemap...
So, here's my question...
Since you can't actually navigate to that original/authentic URL (it still loads with a 200, it's just not actually linkded to from within the site itself), does that create an issue for search engines?
Last consideration...
The bots can still access those pages via the canonical tag and the XML sitemap, it's just that the user wouldn't be able to access those original/authentic pages in their natural site navigation.
Thanks,
Rodrigo
-
Thanks Nakul, agreed.
-
Yes, IMO it should be okay. It's like in the regular search and browse session, you might have session-ids or other user-experience related variables encoded in the URLs but to avoid duplicate content issues, you have canonical tags. Therefore all things tracking, the internal navigation links are not consistent with the canonical version of the same URL. Whenever a user land's from SE's, he'll see the canonical URLs, but as he starts clicking on other links, they would not be consistent again with their canonical versions. Again, yes, this should be okay and that's why the canonical tag was created. What would life be without the canonical tag, huh
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
-
Can multiple geotargeting hreflang tags be set in one URL? International SEO question
Hi All, Thank you for this great post! I have a question please. If i target www.onedirect.co.nl/en/ in English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, are the tags below correct? English for Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg: http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-be" /> http://www.example.co.nl/en/" hreflang="en-lu" /> AND Targeting Holland and Belgium in Dutch: Pour la page www.onedirect.co.nl on peut inclure ce tag: http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-nl" /> http://www.example.co.nl" hreflang="nl-be" /> thanks a lot for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Onedirect_uk0 -
Content From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
How much is the effect of redirecting an old URL to another URL under a new domain?
Example: http://www.olddomain.com/buy/product-type/region/city/area http://www.newdomain.com/product-type-for-sale/city/area Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | esiow20130 -
I've seen and heard alot about city-specific landing pages for businesses with multiple locations, but what about city-specific landing pages for cities nearby that you aren't actually located in? Is it ok to create landing pages for nearby cities?
I asked here https://www.google.com/moderator/#7/e=adbf4 but figured out ask the Moz Community also! Is it actually best practice to create landing pages for nearby cities if you don't have an actual address there? Even if your target customers are there? For example, If I am in Miami, but have a lot of customers who come from nearby cities like Fort Lauderdale is it okay to create those LP's? I've heard this described as best practice, but I'm beginning to question whether Google sees it that way.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley2 -
Website penalised can't find where the problem is. Google went INSANE
Hello, I desperately need a hand here! Firstly I just want to say that I we never infracted google guidelines as far as we know. I have been around in this field for about 6 years and have had success with many websites on the way relying only in natural SEO and was never penalised until now. The problem is that our website www.turbosconto.it is and we have no idea why. (not manual) The web has been online for more than 6 months and it NEVER started to rank. it has about 2 organic visits a day at max. In this time we got several links from good websites which are related to our topic which actually keep sending us about 50 visits a day. Nevertheless our organic visita are still 1 or 2 a day. All the pages seem to be heavily penalised ... when you perform a search for any of our "shops"even including our Url, no entries for the domain appear. A search example: http://www.turbosconto.it zalando What I will expect to find as a result: http://www.turbosconto.it/buono-sconto-zalando The same case repeats for all of the pages for the "shops" we promote. Searching any of the brads + our domain shows no result except from "nike" and "euroclinix" (I see no relationship between these 2) Some days before for these same type of searches it was showing pages from the domain which we blocked by robots months ago, and which go to 404 error instead of our optimised landing pages which cannot be found in the first 50 results. These pages are generated by our rating system... We already send requests to de index all theses pages but they keep appearing for every new page that we create. And the real pages nowhere to be found... Here isan example: http://www.turbosconto.it/shops/codice-promozionale-pimkie/rat
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sebastiankoch
You can see how google indexes that for as in this search: site:www.turbosconto.it rate Why on earth will google show a page which is blocked by the robots.txt displaying that the content cannot retrieved because it is blocked by the robots instead of showing pages which are totally SEO Friendly and content rich... All the script from TurboSconto is the same one that we use in our spanish version www.turbocupones.com. With this last one we have awesome results, so it makes things even more weird... Ok apart from those weird issues with the indexation and the robots, why did a research on out backlinks and we where surprised to fin a few bad links that we never asked for. Never the less there are just a few and we have many HIGH QUALITY LINKS, which makes it hard to believe that this could be the reason. Just to be sure we, we used the disavow tool for these links, here are the bad links we submitted 2 days ago: domain: www.drilldown.it #we did not ask for this domain: www.indicizza.net #we did not ask for this domain: urlbook.in #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://inpe.br.way2seo.org/domain-list-878 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://shady.nu.gomarathi.com/domain-list-789 #we did not ask for this, moreover is a spammy one http://www.clicdopoclic.it/2013/12/i-migliori-siti-italiani-di-coupon-e.html #we did not ask for this, moreover and is a copy of a post of an other blog http://typo.domain.bi/turbosconto.it I have no clue what can it be, we have no warning messages in the webmaster tools or anything.
For me it looks as if google has a BUG and went crazy on judging our italian website. Or perhaps we are just missing something ??? If anyone could throw some light on this I will be really glad and willing to pay some compensation for the help provided. THANKS A LOT!0 -
301 forwarding old urls to new urls - when should you update sitemap?
Hello Mozzers, If you are amending your urls - 301ing to new URLs - when in the process should you update your sitemap to reflect the new urls? I have heard some suggest you should submit a new sitemap alongside old sitemap to support indexing of new URLs, but I've no idea whether that advice is valid or not. Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
What's the best SEO practice for having dynamic content on the same URL?
Let's use this example... www.miniclip.com and there's a function to log in... If you're logged in and a cookie checks that you're logged in and you're on page, let's say, www.miniclip.com/racing-games however the banners being displayed would have more call to action and offers on the page when a user is not logged in to entice them to sign up but the URL would still be www.miniclip.com/racing-games if and if not logged in, what would be the best URL practice for this? just do it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdiRste0 -
In order to improve SEO with silos'urls, should i move my posts from blog directory to pages'directories ?
Now, my website is like this: myurl.com/blog/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html So I use silos urls. I'd like to improve my ranking a little bit more. Is it better to change my urls like this: myurl.com/category1/blog/mypost.html or maybe myurl.com/category1/mypost.html myurl.com/category1/mypage.html Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max840