Is your live site supposed to have rel canonical tags?
-
I recently started working for a company and got them to use Moz and I have found that our secure site and our live sites are creating "duplicate content" according to the Crawl Diagnostics feature. On our secure site we have rel canonical tags pointing to our live site. I'm not super familiar with rel canonical tags, but our developer says we're doing the right thing. Would love any insight you guys may have if this is actually duplicate content or not. Thanks so much!
-
Agree with Dave's comments. 1) Get the syntax updated on your canonical links at a minimum. 2) Yes your canonical solution will "work", but it is not best practice. This "solution" is really a last resort. I would try and push to move away from using canonicals this way. You optimally want 1 URL.
Just to add some color, a great / classic video on this was made by Matt Cutts. He gives all kinds of examples where you could have duplicate URLs, i.e. www vs non www subdomain, sorting parameters added onto the URL, different file extensions, capitalization changes, etc. He then gives 3 options to fix them.
-
Best practice: Fix your site where you only have one URL per content item and link to it consistently (Best solution)
-
Use 301 redirects to consolidate to one URL (Next best solution)
-
Use a canonical link, if you cannot do 1 or 2. (Last resort)
Note that Matt says that they treat a canonical as a strong suggestion (it is treated similar to a 301), but they do not always have to follow it. He repeatedly says, use the first two options, and would NOT recommend a canonical as your best or first option.
My favorite quote is at 2:24 in the video, "Developers keep SEOs in business"
What your developer may notice is that Matt does say that using a canonical link for consolidating http and https will work. No one here would say that it would not, it is just not optimal. Sure, you can use a pair of scissors to cut your lawn, "it will work". It doesn't mean it's the best idea. I would think any developer worth his/her salt would want to have "clean code" and having duplicate URLs is not "clean" by SEO standards
Ok, so now you need to go back to the developer or your manager with an argument that is stronger than just, "Well, some random dude on the Moz forum said that Matt Cutt's from Google said it was preferred not to use a canonical link even though it would work". I would never want to leave you in such a position. Here is what will/can happen over time if you stay with your current setup.
-
Report consolidation issues. When you look at GA for traffic or OSE for links, any spidering tool for technical issues, social sharing counts, you now have split data for any given page potentially. Sure there are ways around this, but now you have to spend all your time "fixing" reports that should not be broken to start with. Trust me, this will come back to bite you on the bum and will cripple your efforts to show the efficacy of your SEO work. Now who really wants that?
-
Link juice consolidation issues. With any redirect - you lose a bit of link juice. If you have links to both sets of URLs, any single page is not getting as much credit as it should.
-
Down the line 301 redirect bloat. If you ever change anything and need to setup a 301 redirect, now you have to setup 2 of them and having too many 301s can negatively impact server performance.
One last thing. If you can get the URLs consolidated into one using 301s etc. Go with the https That is the way that we are headed with the web and so you might as well get going in that direction.
Good luck!
-
-
I really appreciate the response and the added information. I guess we will see if anyone else responds!
-
I'd be interested in hearing what someone else has to say about the way the canonicals are coded. You're doing yours similar to the way I do DNS Prefetching with the double slash to start the URL:
It works fine with prefetching as all the browser needs to do is find the IP of the domain but I'm not sure here how it'll handle sub-directories including www and I hate variables even when they're "it should work". The more common way to canonicalize your secured page would be:
/>
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has any direct experience with this but at the core of technical SEO issues I always lean to "most common usage" and "how Google shows it in their examples" just to make sure there is minimal chance of hiccups or issues.
That aside though, the developer is right though I'd always still prefer to just see the pages at a single URL. Since that can't be done however ... canonicals are the way to go.
-
That is correct! Here is an example of two URL's of what i'm talking about:
http://www.agroup.com/blog/5-signs-of-a-good-clientagency-relatoinship
https://agrouptt4.secure2.agroup.com/blog/5-signs-of-a-good-clientagency-relatoinshipDoes this help clarify my question? I hope so!
-
I'm not sure I entirely understand the scenario so let me note how I'm hearing it to make sure my understanding is correct to put the answer into context. Please do let me know if my understanding of the scenario is wrong as that may well change my thoughts on it.
You note that your secure site and live site are creating duplicate content. Of course a secure site can be live but I'm taking this to mean you have an area behind a login. That it's creating duplicate content is making me think that a lot of the core information is the same and I'm guessing many of the same pages.
If this is all correct and you can't put the duplicated pages onto one URL only then the canonicals are the way to go and your developer is correct.
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
-
Spammy Directories Using Title Meta-Tag For Link
I've been noticing a growing amount of spammy directories using my title Meta-Tag to create a link back to my site. Since my title uses competitive keywords, these external links on spammy directories look over optimized and I fear an algo penalty might get triggered. Should I be concerned and what can I do?
Moz Pro | | alrockn0 -
What do you use for site audit
What tools do you use for conducting a site audit? I need to do an audit on a site and the seomoz web crawler and on page optimization will takes days if not a full week to return any results. In past Ive used other tools that I could run on the fly and they would return broken links, missing htags, keyword density, server information and more. Curious as to what you all use and what you may recommend to use in conjunction with the moz tools.
Moz Pro | | anthonytjm0 -
Quote "There is no SEO software that can help optimize a site"
Hi all I am a developer for a small agency in the UK. I am using SEOmoz for a couple of our clients and I am also using it to learn from. So far I am finding it a great tool and this forum is also incredibly helpful. Now I also visit another forum called HighRankings.com and this months newsletter is a list of points that are defined as "SEO Mistakes". In it, point number 2 reads: "Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of their creators). Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target audience searches for products, services and information such as yours, and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an emotional connection with your visitors so that they'll convert into happy customers." Now as a user of SEOmoz I wondered what others thought of this comment? Many thanks for reading. Kris
Moz Pro | | yousayjump0 -
Links not appearing on Open Site Explorer
My site gained several new inbound links during December and only two of them are not all showing up on the latest Linkscape update. It seems to be the links that were created at the end of the month which are showing up, whereas a handful at the beginning of the month are nowhere to be seen. All the linking pages have been indexed by Google the links are do-follow, and one of the sites in particular is not obsure and has a DA in the 90's. I appreciate the Linkscape doesn't index everything, but I would have thought that more tof the results of my efforts would have shown up in OSE. I'd be really grateful if anyone could explain this to me please. Thanks Ben
Moz Pro | | atticus70 -
Rel Canonical issues for two urls sharing same IP address
Our client built a wordpress site on url A, then opted for a better url B. Rather than moving all the wordpress files/website over to the new url B, they just contacted GoDaddy, who hosted BOTH urls under the same IP address. When I do a term target on url B, I'm flagged for rel canonical use. I can only get a B grade for each keyword. (I've also tried using url A, but I get the same flag and B grade results). I'm not sure if this set-up will thwart our seo efforts for the site, because only the homepage comes up when you type in url B anyway. Every subsequent page displays the original url A. Somewhere, wordpress is also adding a rel canonical link on the homepage source to url A, too, which we can't seem to edit. So, question is: is it ok to leave this set up as is with both urls hosted on the same IP address, or should we move the whole site over to the desired url B? Thanks much!
Moz Pro | | GravitateOnline0 -
Title element too long. Site title on every page?
Hi.. I'm running a theme on wordpress called "The Morning After" (not sure that matters). Right now it seems to be adding my site title to each page title, making it well over the recommended 70 characters. I only see this in my crawl results on SEOmoz so I'm not sure if that's how other bots see it, but wonder if anyone else has had this problem and if so, how do I fix it? Thanks! SJ
Moz Pro | | modhop0 -
Open site explorer tool : domain authority
hi, According open explorer tool the site involved should improve its "domain authority" . So which is the fastest way for improving : Best content ? Backinks from authority domains ? Another technical adjustment ? Tks a lot ...
Moz Pro | | mozllo0