What does Canonical mean?
-
Hi,
I was wondering what is meant by canonical? I ran a test on my site and in the notices, SEOMOZ came back with a total of 90 canonicals. As far as I can tell, it refers to the preferred page (not really sure what that means though). I thought initially it was talking about duplicate content, but all the pages are totally different. There is no duplicate content on any of he pages that it lists. So I'm not sure how to fix this.
Thanks for the help.
Don
-
Thanks Guys,
Really appreciate your input.
Don
-
Just as Broadbeach Media said is the canonical tag to indicate pages with similar content. Big advantage is that you can tell Google which one is the important one and needs to be indexed.
More detailled info you can find here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
-
Good day ge0173400,
Basically canonical was created to tell Google that if you 2 or more pages that have the same content, which page with that content you want Google to focus on.
For example you have 3 pages regarding gold fish. All 3 pages have nearly the exact same content except the species of gold fish. All of a sudden you have duplicate content now. It is then up to you to decide which page you would like to get the most value (let's say page 1). You then put a canonical link on pages 2 & 3 pointing to page 1. This means that when Google crawls pages 2 & 3 it will find out that it should focus on page 1.
If the above is confusing, definitely have a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps It does a great (and better) job of explaining canonical.
Best of luck.
-
Straight from the horses mouth:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/
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
-
Tracking down rel="canonical" on Wordpress site
A rel="canonical" is being added to every page and post on my Wordpress site - not tag results, not category results. Not a major problem, right? Except that I don't know where it's coming from. I've tried tracking it down - change the theme back to a default one, turn off all the plugins - it's still there. Is it coming from .htaccess perhaps? The only issue it is causing is that it has causes me to have to turn off the canonical option in Platinum SEO as that was resulting in two identical rel=canon on each page. It doesn't seem to be causing problem but I'd like to get a better understanding of what it going on.
On-Page Optimization | | robandsarahgillespie0 -
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Product Colour Variation and Canonicals
Hi there, We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations. An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course). My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link? Many thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | yousayjump0 -
What does Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical mean?
I'm a newb and see this on my report and I don't understand what it means. Any help?
On-Page Optimization | | smartapps0 -
What are these means for SEO?
Geo Meta Tags Dublin core Microformats What are they and If they are helpful for SEO purposes.How can i set them?My site is in wordpress.
On-Page Optimization | | csfarnsworth0 -
Canonical Help?
This canonical thing is brand new to me and I'm trying to wrap my mind around it. Here is my situation: I use Wordpress. I am showing duplicate content with the following url's http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/ http://crosstrainingandfitness.com/online-workout-blog/page/2/ Would setting a canonical link solve this? If so, what do I put in the Canonical box for this category (online workout blog). I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin. Any help is greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | carbbon0 -
Is it a good idea to rel=canonical dozens of old outdated pages?
we have dozens old outdated manual pages that still need to be up, but have terrible code issues (they're exported from word) and no image tagging, etc. there are new pages in place, so should i rel=canonical to the new pages? will this transfer any link juice to the newer, more seo-friendly ones?
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880 -
Almost all pages showing under Notices Rel Canonical - why???
Hi, I'm just going through my latest crawl since my new site launch and havce noticed almost all of my websites pages are listed under the notices rel canonical section, Why is this? All pages have the unique pages titles followed by the site name in the title, for example: Product | Site name All pages have unique meta descriptions and content (although we only offer lots of differt varients of the same product). Is this something I should be worried about?
On-Page Optimization | | EclipseLegal0