Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Rel=canonical on Godaddy Website builder
-
Hey crew!
First off this is a last resort asking this question here. Godaddy has not been able to help so I need my Moz Fam on this one.
So common problem
My crawl report is showing I have duplicate home pages www.answer2cancer.org and www.answer2cancer.org/home.html
I understand this is a common issue with apache webservers which is why the wonderful rel=canonical tag was created! I don't want to go through the hassle of a 301 redirect of course for such a simple issue.
Now here's the issue. Godaddy website builder does not make any sense to me. In wordpress I could just go add the tag to the head in the back end. But no such thing exist in godaddy. You have to do this weird drag and drop html block and drag it somewhere on the site and plug in the code. I think putting before the code instead of just putting it in there. So I did that but when I publish and inspect in chrome I cannot see the tag in the head!
This is confusing I know. the guy at godaddy didn't stand a chance lol.
Anyway much love for any replies!
-
Thanks Rhonda! It sounds like this thread will benefit many people then.
-
Thomas,
I am on GoDaddy's Website Builder as well and had the exact same issue that brought me to this thread. I did what they suggested and it got rid of my crawler seeing a duplicate with the home.html page.
Here is what I did:
- In ALL menu navigations, I replaced the links to home.html with the root URL of my domain (like http://myurl.com) I had to do this for my main navigation at the top of my website and then a footer navigation that I had.
- Then, for my logo image in my header, I had to change the link from the home.html page to the same root URL.
After I did this, I did a recrawl and now home.html is not being found and therefore, not showing up as a duplicate.
Would have been nice to have been able to put in a canonical reference but you get what you get and for the flexibility of Website Builder for a quick website, I'll take the extra work to get it just right
Good luck!
-Rhonda
-
Sadly I completely believe you.
If it's not cost or time prohibitive, I'd recommend moving to Godaddy's Wordpress hosting package and rebuild the site in Wordpress, which won't have these problems. Godaddy might even offer a conversion package of some kind.
Otherwise you might try a website builder option like Squarespace instead, which is also fairly decent for basic SEO considerations like this.
-
Guys your not going to believe this but neither of those two things are possible on godaddy website builder. Maybe I should just pack up the gloves and chalk this one for a loss. Does it really even matter? Could the crawl report be wrong? These are the things that keep me up at night.
-
Good call on GTM - I always forget about the ability to add normal HTML snippets.
-
Thomas,
I agree with everything Kane suggested. Additionally, you might ask GoDaddy if you can add some Google Tag Manager code to the site so you can edit header and body code without messing with Godaddy's website builder. It might be a learning curve for you, but Google has good documentation and courses on how to use GTM.
-
I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.
Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.
You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.
Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Product Variations (rel=canonical or 301) & Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, Hoping for a bit of advice here please, I’ve been tasked with building an e-commerce store and all is going well so far. We decided to use Wordpress with Woocommerce as our shop plugin. I’ve been testing the CSV import option for uploading all our products and I’m a little concerned on two fronts: - Product Variations Duplicate content within the product descriptions **Product Variations: - ** We are selling furniture that has multiple variations (see list below) and as a result it creates c.50 product variations all with their own URL’s. Facing = Left, Right Leg style = Round, Straight, Queen Ann Leg colour = Black, White, Brown, Wood Matching cushion = Yes, No So my question is should I 301 re-direct the variation URL’s to the main product URL as from a user perspective they aren't used (we don't have images for each variation that would trigger the URL change, simply drop down options for the user to select the variation options) or should I add the rel canonical tag to each variation pointing back to the main product URL. **Duplicate Content: - ** We will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Link rel="prev" AND canonical
Hi guys, When you have several tabs on your website with products, you can most likely navigate to page 2, 3, 4 etc...
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
You can add the link rel="prev" and link rel="next" tags to make sure that 1 page get's indexed / ranked by Google. am I correct? However this still means that all the pages can get indexed, right? For example a webshop makes use of the link rel="prev" and ="next" tags. In the Google results page though, all the seperate tabs pages are still visible/indexed..
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=1
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=24
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=19
etc..... Can we prevent this, and make sure only the main page get's indexed and ranked, by adding a canonical link on every 'tab page' to the main page --> www.domain.nl/watches/ I hope I explained it well and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Regards, Tom1 -
Magento Dublicate Content (Noindex and Rel"canonical")
Hi All, Just looking for some advice regarding my website on magento. We by mistake didnt enable canonical tags and noindex tags so had a big problem with dublicate content from filter pages but also have URLs to Cats as Yes so this didnt help with not having canonical tags enabled. We now have everything enabled for a few weeks now but dont see much drop in indexed pages in google. (currently 27k and we have only 5k products) My question basically is how do we speed up noindexation of dublicate content and also would you change URL to cats as No so google just now sees the url to products? (my concerns with this is would leaving it to Yes help because it will hopefully read the canonical tags on products now) Thank you in advance Michael
Technical SEO | | TogetherCare0 -
Screaming From occurences and canonicals what does it all mean
Bonjourno from Wetherby UK... Ive used a package called screamong frog to diagnose canonical errors but can anyone tell me what this means? http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/cc53/zymurgy_bucket/understand-occurances-canonical.jpg Thanks in advance. David
Technical SEO | | Nightwing0 -
Websites being hacked & duplicated, what should we do?
Hi, please help! Our website was hacked and being totally duplicated. They even injected codes to intercept our orders. Although the codes issue had been solved, still there're two mirror sites out there. When search for some of our key words, they even have good ranks. What exactly can we do to let Google ban those two sites. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Squall3150 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0