Intra-linking to pages with a different Canonical url ?
-
Hello Moz Community!
I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate.
Scenario:
Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry.
Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site).
Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes'
Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True
SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term.
The Issue / Question:
Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True
Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/
The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category?
OR
Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?
-
Thanks for the thorough response! Ecommerce sure does add a level of complexity to the whole process.
-
Categorization is a difficult issue for ecommerce sites. You want to have enough categories so people can easily find products, but at the same time you do not want to risk a duplicate content penalty or a then content penalty, by being over categorized.
I think with the canonical url pointing to the no filtered page it will be next to impossible to rank the page. If you are looking for click throughs from organic sources, it should work, but from search engines I don't think it will.
The way I handled the issue with one of my clients might be something you could do and it would provide better results. In the ecommerce platform I use it has searches and filters as well. What I did with their shop was I created a module that would handle some searches and filters differently. Basically they could enter a term in the module, say christmas, and any searches or filters on the site for the exact match word would rewrite the term as a psuedo category. It is kind of hard to explain the logic, but it created a stub page, like in your case would be something like /drivetrain/road-cassettes where the cannocial url could be set to the page, the meta description, title, and on page category description could be different. But the page was not accessible through any category structure or any other way, just through the search and filters. Basically what you are creating is a landing page catered to search terms.
If this is done sparingly, there is no issue with it, if you go through and make 10k pages like this, you might get a penalty. What I did was take the top terms that had been searched in the site and used them as a list of what landing pages to make.
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
-
Does adding more outgoing links on a high PA page decrease the juice passed to previous links?
Hi, I'm not sure how PA DA exactly works when the goal is to create backlinks to your site in order to have the most impact on passing PA DA juice (if there is such a thing) to ones money site. For example let's say you have a blog and the PA is 40 DA is 30. Let's say I create a backlink pointing to my site on the homepage of this blog, in which I desire better rankings for, and the links I created are only 1-3 outgoing links on this post which is again on the homepage. Then say in a months time, I want to add another post on the homepage (so the 40 PA and 30 DA stays the same) creating a backlink to one of my other money sites. Does adding this second round of backlinks result in sending less juice to the first? This is what I want to know. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | z8YX9F800 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
301 canonical'd pages?
I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in: a a) mysite.com/products/hat b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C. I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd? Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Can you Canonical to a URL in a different folder under the same domain?
I want to know if it's possible to add a canonical tag to a URL that points to a URL under a different folder. Content is just about the same. Here's an example (fake urls and product, but structure and parameters are similar to my client's website): domain.com/toy-ducks-results.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis domain.com/toy-ducks-details.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis&style=Sparkly Let's say that my purple Elvis ducks are really popular. Is there any harm in putting a rel=canonical on the Sparkly Elvis ducks page to the purple Elvis ducks page? Even though they are two different folders? /toy-ducks-results and /toy-ducks-details So, in effect, the preferred folder is /toy-ducks-results Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE30 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
Google places page related places links to competitor
I noticed on a lot of Google places pages i create for my clients Google seems to put related places links at the bottom of the page which links directly to their competitors. how can i remove control or avoid these links been placed? Also any tips on improving the places page would be greatly appreciated thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
I am working SEO on a website that has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword.
I have run into a situation where a website has 2 pages for different variations of a keyword. I personally like to use 1 page and make it powerful for a variety of variations of that keyword. Unfortunately for the site I’m working on, using only one page is not an option. Here is an example: They have a page for “Alex Miley Cameras” and then they have a page for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. On the first one they want to rank for Alex Miley & Alex Miley Cameras. For the 2<sup>nd</sup> they want to rank for “Alex Miley Cell Phones”. My concern is will Google be indecisive on which page to rank for the keyword “Alex Miley” since they both contain this word. Also, will it affect any of the other words and spread the juice making each page weaker. I would appreciate advice on how to rank these pages each separately for their keywords and not have to worry about any confusion from Google. I can’t change the structure of the site. I only have access to the Meta info and page content. Thank you for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPresident0 -
Does having multiple links to the same page influence the Link juice this page is able to pass
Say you have a page and it has 4 outgoing links to the same internal page. In the original Pagerank algo if these links were links to an page outside your own domain, this would mean that the linkjuice this page is able to pass would be devided by 4. The thing is i'm not sure if this is also the case when the outgoing link, is linking to a page on your own domain. I would say that outgoing links (whatever the destination) will use some of your link juice, so it would be better to have 1 outgoing link instead of 4 to the same destination, the the destination will profit more form that link. What are you're thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TjeerdvZ0