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.
Google is indexing urls with parameters despite canonical
-
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.
-
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:
-
The rel=canonical tag as you've tried
-
Adding a noindex tag as pointed out above
-
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
-
-
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
-
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
But in code you can see:
www.myweb.com/url123?type=3 has the rel="canonical" href="//myweb.com/url123" />
-
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
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
No index for http version of website
Hi, I've had a message from Google search console to say the sitemap for the http version of my site is tagged as no index. As the https version is indexed, do I need to change the http version to be indexed as well? Do I need to keep the http version of the site in search console alongside the https version, or should I remove it? Advice appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | Robingoodlad0 -
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 -
Disappearing and reappearing in google index
Hello. I made a lot of car accident lawyer city pages. They probably weren't as unique as they should have been. Suddenly, they all disappeared from the rankings and I freaked out. Then, two days later, they all returned. Is this a bad sign? Should I be worried? Why would they drop out of the rankings and come back in? Let me know, thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | RafeTLouis0 -
How important are clean URLs?
Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness. Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?
On-Page Optimization | | Gavo1 -
Correct .htaccess settings for canonical url?
I want to forward all urls to http:www.mysite.com but am a little confuse because I am getting duplicate content error: Pages with Duplicate Page Content as of Jan 15http://titanappliancerepair.com/ 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.html 1 duplicate*****************************************************************What should I put ion htaccess file so I can forwardhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.htmlhttp://titanappliancerepair.comhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/to http://www.titanappliancerepair.comor what is the correct way to do it?I'm confused because when I enter http://titanappliancerepair.com/ in browser it showshttp://titanappliancerepair.com so how can it be considered duplicate content?.Can someone help?I have godaddy and they have gave me this code to put RewriteEngine on
On-Page Optimization | | webbutler13
rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]What is correct?0 -
Blocking Subdomain from Google Crawl and Index
Hey everybody, how is it going? I have a simple question, that i need answered. I have a main domain, lets call it domain.com. Recently our company will launch a series of promotions for which we will use cname subdomains, i.e try.domain.com, or buy.domain.com. They will serve a commercial objective, nothing more. What is the best way to block such domains from being indexed in Google, also from counting as a subdomain from the domain.com. Robots.txt, No-follow, etc? Hope to hear from you, Best Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | JesusD3 -
Does Google look at page design
Hi everybody, At the moment i'm creating several webshops and websites with the same layout, so visitors can recognize the websites are from the same company. But i was wondering: Does google look at the layout of a webpage that it's not a copy of another website? This because loads of website have the same wordpress/joomla templates etc, or doesn't this effect rankingpositions? Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | iwebdevnl0
