Google is indexing urls with parameters despite canonical

[Red_educativa]

Hello Moz,

Google is indexing lots of urls despite the canonical in my site. Those urls are linked all over the site with parameters like ?, and looks like Google is indexing them despite de canonical. Is Google deciding to index those urls because they are linked all over the site? The canonical tag is well implemented.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

As has been pointed out, the rel=canonical tag is just a suggestion to Google that you don't want a page to be indexed or to rank. They can choose to ignore the tag if they want to. If you want to keep pages out of the index, there are a few options:

1. The rel=canonical tag as you've tried

2. Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above

3. Use the URL parameters configuration option in Google Webmaster Tools

Give that you've tried the first one, I'd recommend giving the second two options a try and seeing what happens.

I hope that helps!

Paddy

[danatanseo]

I believe the problem here is being caused by the fact that you are using relative, rather than absolute URLs for your canonical tag. I've seen this happen before on a site I was working on.  Thanks to awesome suggestions from Moz Q & A from community member George Andrews (endorsed by Dr. Pete Meyers), we updated all of our canonical tags to be absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. This completely solved the exact problem you are describing.

Here's a link to that thread: http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/what-is-the-proper-syntax-for-rel-canonical

The best news is, it's a very easy, inexpensive and quick SEO win. I love those!

Dana

[Red_educativa]

Thanks for your answerk, but I don't think this can be the solition.

The problem is that Google is indexing urls with parameters, so, I can see in SERPS those urls indexed despite the canonical

www.myweb.com/url123?type=3

www.myweb.com/url123

But in code you can see:

www.myweb.com/url123?type=3 has the rel="canonical" href="//myweb.com/url123" />

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

The rel canonical tag won't prevent pages from being indexed - all it does is act as a way to 'suggest' to Google that there is a preferred page. if you don't want pages indexing, you have to prevent Google from crawling and indexing them (noindex).

-Andy