Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google?
-
Hi, we re-branded and launched a new website in February 2016. In June we saw a steep drop in the number of URLs indexed, and there have continued to be smaller dips since. We started an account with Moz and found several thousand high priority crawl errors for duplicate pages and have since fixed those with canonical tags. However, we are still seeing the number of URLs indexed drop.
Do URLs with canonical tags get indexed by Google? I can't seem to find a definitive answer on this. A good portion of our URLs have canonical tags because they are just events with different dates, but otherwise the content of the page is the same.
-
Thanks so much! Really helpful!
-
Not exactly. Its not so much that the canonical "supersedes" an index, follow tag.... a canonical tag establishes equivalency while a NoIndex is more like a "does not equal." The Index, Follow is still there and being seen by bots as they crawl... in fact, if you had NoIndex on a page with a Canonical Tag, it may not even see the canonical at all since you told it to NoIndex the page. The Meta Robots Index tag comes first allowing the bots to crawl and index the page but then the canonical sets up equivalency to a separate page. So if your canonical tag is being respected, it doesn't wind up doing the same thing as a NoIndex (though it may seem that way) nor does it do the same thing as a 301 (though there are similarities in how equity is passed). Since a canonical establishes an equivalency, you'll find that the Canon Page will eventually take the place of the Canonicalized Page in search results because you're telling them the Canonicalized Page _is _the Canon Page & that the Canon page is the right version of both.
-
Thanks, Mike! So, just to clarify, for a particular URL, if we have Meta Robots set to "Index/Follow" and that same URL has a canonical tag, the canonical tag would supersede the robot command and the URL would not be indexed?
-
If a URL was indexed and has since had a canonical added to it pointing to another page, it will eventually disappear from results. Basically the pages gets consolidated with its canon page. If the bots choose to respect the canonical tag in that instance, all signals get passed to the canon page while still allowing the page and information to be accessible by human visitors. As such, there's no reason to keep the page in the index because you're telling the bots that another page is the correct page instead. This is not the same as NoIndexing a page but will eventually remove a page from the index much in the same way that a 301 will pass equity along to another page while eventually removing the redirected page from the index in favor of the page being redirected to.
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
-
Google indexing is slowing down?
I have up to 20 million unique pages, and so far I've only submitted about 30k of them on my sitemap. We had a few load related errors during googles initial visits, and it thought some were duplicates, but we fixed all that. We haven't gotten a crawl related error for 2 weeks now. Google appears to be indexing fewer and fewer urls every time it visits. Any ideas why? I am not sure how to get all our pages indexed if its going to operate like this... love some help thanks! HnJaXSM.png
Technical SEO | | RyanTheMoz0 -
Does google look at H3 tags?
I've had someone tell me that google doesn't pay attention to H3 tags -- only H1 and H2. I haven't found much online to back this up or discredit it; thought I'd ask the Moz community!
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick5 -
How preproduction website is getting indexed in Google.
Hi team, Can anybody please help me to find how my preproduction website and urls are getting indexed in Google.
Technical SEO | | nlogix0 -
Get List Of All Indexed Google Pages
I know how to run site:domain.com but I am looking for software that will put these results into a list and return server status (200, 404, etc). Anyone have any tips?
Technical SEO | | InfinityTechnologySolutions0 -
Why is google not deindexing pages with the meta noindex tag?
On our website www.keystonepetplace.com we added the meta noindex tag to category pages that were created by the sorting function. Google no longer seems to be adding more of these pages to the index, but the pages that were already added are still in the index when I check via site:keystonepetplace.com Here is an example page: http://www.keystonepetplace.com/dog/dog-food?limit=50 How long should it take for these pages to disappear from the index?
Technical SEO | | JGar-2203710 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Rel=canonical and Google analytics referrals
Hello guys, If I put (rel=can) from site1.com/page1 to site2.com/page1, will site2.com see in his Google Analytics that people are coming from site1.com in the referrals section or somewhere else? I can't find anything on the web about that. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | YST0 -
Speed up the process of removing URLs from Google Index
Hi guys, We have done some work to try to remove pages from Google index. We have done the following: 1. Noindex tag 2. Make pages returning a 404 response. Is there anyway to notify Google about these changes so we can speed up the process of removing these pages from Google index? Also regarding the URL removal tool, Google says that it's used to remove URLs from search results, does it mean the URLs are removed from their index too? Many thanks guys David
Technical SEO | | sssrpm0