Should I use a canonical tag or 301 with Wordpress posts?
-
Hi all,
I'm trying to determine if canonical or 301 is a better way of handling an issue on my site.
The Background
I've got a Wordpress website where pages are in-depth reference articles and the posts are for short news blurbs. When I produce a new resource page, I also make a short post telling readers about the new resource. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plug in.
Sometimes, Google will rank the 200 word post higher than the 2000 word resource page. I suspect that is because of the order in which they were crawled by Google, but I do not know for sure.
The Question
To make sure that the resource page is seen as the most important location on the site for the topic, should I use the canonical section in the Yoast plugin on the post to point to the page? Or should I wait, and after a few days (when the news blurb is off of the first page) just 301 the post to the page?
Are there any link juice considerations when using the canonical option?
Thanks for the help!
Richard
-
Awesome information. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
-Richard
-
Hi Richard,
My initial recommendation based on this information is to use a canonical rather than a 301 redirect, assuming that the content on the shorter news blurb is similar enough to the resource page. This will allow for both pages to exist, while consolidating indexing signals, such as link equity, to the longer resource page. I'd imagine you want both pages on your site for usability purposes, e.g. users might visit your news section more frequently and they can see the announcement for the new resource. In contrast, the 301 would effectively remove the news page from your site, because it would simply redirect to the resource page. And from a link equity perspective, 301s and canonicals offer the same value based on the information currently available.
I suspect that the news page is ranking higher than the resource page because of your site architecture: blog/news pages may be receiving more internal links and from stronger pages than resource pages. That's definitely something you might want to look into if you're seeing this issue--news blurbs outranking the actual resource--happening consistently.
If you do go with the canonical option, be sure to use the full URL in the reference instead of absolute path, e.g. www.example.com/resource-name instead of the relative path, /resource-name.
-Trung
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
-
Pros and Cons of using rel=next on blog posts
Hi there, at the bottom of my website's blog posts the rel=prev and rel=next tags are used on links that point to the previous article that was posted and the next article that was posted. Often these articles are not 'linked' in terms of their content or message. Is this the correct use of rel=next/prev and if not what are the possible negative effects. Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | Bee1590 -
Should I use canonical tag in these cases?
Should I use canonical tag in these cases? On the page itself (with the tag pointing to itself) On pages that doesn't have duplicate versions
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
301 Redirect Url Within a Canonical Tag
So this might sounds like a silly question... A client of mine has a duplicate content issue which will be fixed using canonical tags. We are also providing them with an updated URL structure meaning rwe will be having to do lots of 301 redirects. The URL structure is a much larger task that than the duplicate content so i planned to set up the canonicals first. Then it occurred to me id be updating the canonical tags with the urls from the old structure which brings me to my question. Will the canonical tags with the old urls redirect credit to the new urls with the 301? Or should i just wait until we have the new url structure in place and use these new urls in the canonicals? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Rel Canonical for the Same Page
Hi, I was looking in my one of my moz accounts and under analyz page under notices is a message that says: Rel Canonical Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. I checked an notice that I do have a rel='canonical' href='http://www.example.com' /> from the home page of http://www.example.com. I guess my question is. Does having a Rel Canonical going to the same page hurt my SEO? I'm not sure why it is there but wanted to make sure I address this correctly. I was under the impression you use Rel Canonical for duplicate or similar pages and you want to let Google know what page to show. But since I've made this mistake to where I am saying to show the home page if you find a similar home page, should I just delete the Rel Canonical. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | ErrickG
Errick0 -
Does using cufon for H-tags etc hurt SEO?
Does the use of cufon for H-tags et al affect SEO/how Google views your website?
Technical SEO | | Alligator0 -
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 -
301 redirect of a subdirectory
Hello! I am working on a website with the following structure: example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. The page "example.com/sub1" does not exist (I know this is not the optimal architecture to have this be a nonexistent page). But someone might type that address, so I would like it to redirect it to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. I tried the following redirect: redirect 301 /sub1 http://example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3. But with this redirect in place, if I go to example.com/sub1, I get redirected to example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3/sub2/sub3 (the redirect just inserts extra subdirectories). If someone types "example.com/sub1" into a browser, I would "example.com/sub1/sub2/sub3" to come up. Is this possible? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | nyc-seo0 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2