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
-
Dynamic Canonical Tag for Search Results Filtering Page
Hi everyone, I run a website in the travel industry where most users land on a location page (e.g. domain.com/product/location, before performing a search by selecting dates and times. This then takes them to a pre filtered dynamic search results page with options for their selected location on a separate URL (e.g. /book/results). The /book/results page can only be accessed on our website by performing a search, and URL's with search parameters from this page have never been indexed in the past. We work with some large partners who use our booking engine who have recently started linking to these pre filtered search results pages. This is not being done on a large scale and at present we only have a couple of hundred of these search results pages indexed. I could easily add a noindex or self-referencing canonical tag to the /book/results page to remove them, however it’s been suggested that adding a dynamic canonical tag to our pre filtered results pages pointing to the location page (based on the location information in the query string) could be beneficial for the SEO of our location pages. This makes sense as the partner websites that link to our /book/results page are very high authority and any way that this could be passed to our location pages (which are our most important in terms of rankings) sounds good, however I have a couple of concerns. • Is using a dynamic canonical tag in this way considered spammy / manipulative? • Whilst all the content that appears on the pre filtered /book/results page is present on the static location page where the search initiates and which the canonical tag would point to, it is presented differently and there is a lot more content on the static location page that isn’t present on the /book/results page. Is this likely to see the canonical tag being ignored / link equity not being passed as hoped, and are there greater risks to this that I should be worried about? I can’t find many examples of other sites where this has been implemented but the closest would probably be booking.com. https://www.booking.com/searchresults.it.html?label=gen173nr-1FCAEoggI46AdIM1gEaFCIAQGYARS4ARfIAQzYAQHoAQH4AQuIAgGoAgO4ArajrpcGwAIB0gIkYmUxYjNlZWMtYWQzMi00NWJmLTk5NTItNzY1MzljZTVhOTk02AIG4AIB&sid=d4030ebf4f04bb7ddcb2b04d1bade521&dest_id=-2601889&dest_type=city& Canonical points to https://www.booking.com/city/gb/london.it.html In our scenario however there is a greater difference between the content on both pages (and booking.com have a load of search results pages indexed which is not what we’re looking for) Would be great to get any feedback on this before I rule it out. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | GAnalytics1 -
Should you use the canonicalization tag when the content isn't exactly a duplicate?
We have a site that pull data from different sources with unique urls onto a main page and we are thinking about using the canonicalization tag to keep those source pages from being indexed and to give any authority to the main page. But this isn’t really what canonicalization is supposed to be used for so I’m unsure of if this is the right move.
Technical SEO | | Fuel
To give some more detail: We manage a site that has pages for individual golf courses. On the golf course page in addition to other general information we have sections on that page that show “related articles” and “course reviews”.
We may only show 4 or 5 on each of those courses pages per page, but we have hundreds of related articles and reviews for each course. So below “related articles” on the course page we have a link to “see more articles” that would take the user to a new page that is simply a aggregate page that houses all the article or review content related to that course.
Since we would rather have the overall course page rank in SERPs rather than the page that lists these articles, we are considering canonicalizing the aggregate news page up to the course page.
But, as I said earlier, this isn’t really what the canonicalization tag is intended for so I’m hesitant.
Has anyone else run across something like this before? What do you think?0 -
To 301 redirect or not...
Hi guys i'd like to get your opinion on this. We currently have two sites, site A is the old one with PA44 and DA33. Site B is the new one which is going to replace site A it currently has PA37 and DA24 Our plan for the future is to shut down site A and redirect all pages using 301 to the relevant pages on side B. Currently we have some links in place for a couple of keywords on site A to site B which seems to be working great for our ranking. Now i'm wondering if this is maybe a good option, to give back links from A to B or will i pass through more link juice when redirecting everything? (ps. both are e commerce sites hosted and registred with different companies)
Technical SEO | | Immanuel0 -
Canonical tag problem
Hello I'm newbie here i dont know very well about seo but i would like to ask your help? I'm running report about my website and on report I dont have canonical tag on my products. But if i check from on page report link by link it shows that I have canonical tag. At the same time if i check my pages code i can see below canonical tag codes? Do we use canonical tags wrong? What can cause this different information? Could you please help me? Is it important to use canonical tag beginning or end? I'm using now trial version and trying to understand report is correct what is my mistakes. Thanks in advance My code is
Technical SEO | | FRUTIKO0 -
Isnt it better to have headlines in H1 and H2 tags instead of p tags?
I am working with a simple site http://http://lightsigns.com/Uniko_Manufacturing_Limited.html They seek more SEO traffic. However, the two big headlines that read "Wholesale Supply to the Sign and Display Industries" which is on line 241 and 242 of the source code, its in a p tag, i.e. <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Wholesale Supply to the and <p <span class="webkit-html-tag">style</p <span>="padding-bottom: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style_1">Sign and Display Industries Likewise, the product titles are in p tags, also. For example, on the Slide-in Light Box product page, http://lightsigns.com/Slide_In_light_box.html , I have done keyword research and no one is using the words slide in light box.Plus, it is also a p tag, ie. line 43 reads style="padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-top: 0pt; " class="paragraph_style">Slide-in Light Box If I suggest that they make an H2 tag with SEO-optimized keywords such as Display Light Box - Slide-In LIght Box, would this indeed help SEO? In summary, is it correct to say that H1 and H2 tags are stronger signals to the search bots of what the page is about?
Technical SEO | | BridgetGibbons1 -
Notice - canonical tag
I've got several errors pointing to canonical tag, but do not know how to solve.Any help? Rel Canonical Found 6 days ago <dl> <dt>Tag value</dt> <dd>http://www.yougraph.com/</dd> <dt>Description</dt> <dd>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical.</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a>
Technical SEO | | nlopes1 -
Wordpress question
I was curious when i run an OSE report on certain websites and their name.wordpress.com shows up with a PA of whatever and a DA of 100. But when I created my wordpress site and post on it, it only has a PA and DA of 1. is this because SEOmoz has not indexed it yet? It is a month old. http://shiftinsurance.wordpress.com/ Can anyone help pls?
Technical SEO | | greasy0 -
Does Bing support cross-domain canonical tags?
We have heard Bing takes canonical tags as hints, but do they support cross-domain canonical tags? I don't think this has ever been discussed? Does anyone have an answer or insight? Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | bonnierSEO0