Canonical Confusion
-
So I have products appearing in several categories, all of which have the correct canonical url. But Moz is flagging up pages I never knew existed, and I don't understand why they exist at all and more so why my canonical fix isn't occurring for them, as below:
SEO Friendly URL: http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2
Weird URL to same product: http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159
Is this a developer problem rather than an SEO problem?
-
I understand , you may need an opencart professional to fix the problem.
-
Hello Vijay,
As discussed previously I already use an extension and the problem is still occurring. I was hopeful with the solution in your 2nd link, tried it, and as with most things gave me an error and took down my site. I'm sure this error is a problem that a good developer could fix but alas I don't have one.
-
THIs is the common issue with all open cart sites, if you discuss this issue with the developer, he will be able to fix it… no big deal!
-
Hi spacecollective,
Firstly, I love the site and I'll be buying a gift for my dad's birthday from here!
There are definitely some issues with canonical tag and redirect chains here. I'd say it's an issue with the development of the site that is now causing SEO issues - so it's an issue for both!
I'll use the product you mentioned in my example:
http://thespacecollective.com/index.php?route=themecontrol/product&product_id=159
canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/
which redirects to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2
which canonicalizes to
http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/All of these URLs should have the same canonical URL. I always prefer to canonicalize products that appear under multiple categories to the root level (it's also what Magento does by default and it works very well).
So, in this example, all variations would have a canonical tag pointing to
http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/However, in your OpenCart CMS, it may be easier to canonicalize these to the final URL in the chain (http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/nasa-pin-sets/nasa-shuttle-mission-pin-set-no2/) as this is also the URL that is listed in the XML sitemap.
If you choose to canonicalize to the root level, you will need to make sure that the sitemap is updated to only include this new canonical URLs.
Hope this helps. Feel free to send me a PM if you have any further questions
Cheers,
David
-
Hi There,
I checked your website, it uses Opencart as a platform for e-commerce. You can search and use an extension from here http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension&filter_search=product canonical url seo
Or this can help you through https://isenselabs.com/posts/how-to-solve-the-duplicate-content-issue-in-opencart
I hope this helps, please feel free to ask further questions.
Regards,
Vijay
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
-
How to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
Hello, after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site. Current indexation status: The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages Additional info: Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination. Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting: example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100 Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed. When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position). In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages. The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000 And so I have a few questions: Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed? If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt? Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way? As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thpchlk0 -
URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
Hi Moz community! I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing. Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case: our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx) products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots? For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ... Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!). Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaZylberberg0 -
Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)
Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links. Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up? I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com" via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up... Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sfgmedia0 -
Rel=prev/next and canonical tags on paginated pages?
Hi there, I'm using rel="prev" and rel="next" on paginated category pages. On 1st page I'm also setting a canonical tag, since that page happens to get hits to an URL with parameters. The site also uses mobile version of pages on a subdomain. Here's what markup the 1st desktop page has: Here's what markup the 2nd desktop page has: Here's what markup the 1st MOBILE page has: Here's what markup the 2nd MOBILE page has: Questions: 1. On desktop pages starting from page 2 to page X, if these pages get traffic to their versions with parameters, will I'll have duplicate issues or the canonical tag on 1st page makes me safe? 2. Should I use canonical tags on mobile pages starting from page 2 to page X? Are there any better solutions of avoiding duplicate content issues?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poiseo1 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Use of Rel=Canonical
I have been pondering whether I am using this tag correctly or not. We have a custom solution which lays out products in the typical eCommerce style with plenty of tick box filters to further narrow down the view. When I last researched this it seemed like a good idea to implement rel=canonical to point all sub section pages at a 'view-all' page which returns all the products unfiltered for that given section. Normally pages are restricted down to 9 results per page with interface options to increase that. This combined with all the filters we offer creates many millions of possible page permutations and hence the need for the Canonical tag. I am concerned because our view-all pages get large, returning all of that section's product into one place.If I pointed the view-all page at say the first page of x results would that defeat the object of the view-all suggestion that Google made a few years back as it would require further crawling to get at all the data? Alternatively as these pages are just product listings, would NoIndex be a better route to go given that its unlikely they will get much love in Google anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | motiv80 -
Can I use rel=canonical and then remove it?
Hi all! I run a ticketing site and I am considering using rel=canonical temporary. In Europe, when someone is looking for tickets for a soccer game, they look for them differently if the game is played in one city or in another city. I.e.: "liverpool arsenal tickets" - game played in the 1st leg in 2012 "arsenal liverpool tickets - game played in the 2nd leg in 2013 We have two different events, with two different unique texts but sometimes Google chooses the one in 2013 one before the closest one, especially for queries without dates or years. I don't want to remove the second game from our site - exceptionally some people can broswer our website and buy tickets with months in advance. So I am considering place a rel=canonical in the game played in 2013 poiting to the game played in a few weeks. After that, I would remove it. Would that make any sense? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0 -
Will the Canonical tag fix this issue?
I recently joined promoz and I've been busy working through the issues raised brought to light during the crawls of our Magento site, www.unitedbmwonline.com. One of many issues were the 10,000+ Duplicate Page Titles which I believe are the result of not using Canonical tags when setting up the store. This is now corrected and hopefully I'll see a significant drop in this value after this next crawl. Am I correct in this assumption? Cheers, Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SteveMaguire0