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.
Why is rel="canonical" pointing at a URL with parameters bad?
-
Context
Our website has a large number of crawl issues stemming from duplicate page content (source: Moz).
According to an SEO firm which recently audited our website, some amount of these crawl issues are due to URL parameter usage. They have recommended that we "make sure every page has a Rel Canonical tag that points to the non-parameter version of that URL…parameters should never appear in Canonical tags."
Here's an example URL where we have parameters in our canonical tag...
http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/
rel="canonical" href="http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/womens-costumes/?pageSize=0&pageSizeBottom=0" />
Our website runs on IBM WebSphere v 7.
Questions
- Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL?
- What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters?
- Any advice for correcting this?
Thanks for any help!
-
Thanks for the response, Eric.
My research suggested the same plan of attack: 1) fixing the canonical tags and 2) Google Search Console URL Parameters. It's helpful to get your confirmation.
My best guess is that the parameters you've cited above are not needed for every URL. I agree that this looks like something WebSphere Commerce probably controls. I'm a few organizational layers removed from whoever set this up for us. I'll try to track down where we can control that.
-
Thanks Peter!
-
Peter has a great answer with some good resources referenced, and i'll try to add on a little bit:
1. Why it is important that the rel canonical tag points to a non-parameter URL?
It's important to use clean URLs so search engines can understand the site structure (like Peter mentioned), which will help reduce the potential for index bloat and ranking issues. The more pages out there containing the same content (ie duplicate content), the harder it will be for search engines to determine which is the best page to show in search results. While there is no "duplicate content penalty" there could be a self inflicted wound by providing too many similar options. The canonical tag is supposed to be a level of control for you to tell Google which page is the most appropriate version. In this case it should be the clean URL since that will be where you want people to start. Users can customize from there using faceted navigation or custom options.
2. What is the extent of the negative impact from having rel canonicals pointing to URLs including parameters?
Basically duplicate content and indexing issues. Both of those things you really want to avoid when running an eComm shop since that will make your pages compete with each other for ranking. That could cost ranking, visits, and revenue if implemented wrong.
3. Any advice for correcting this?
Fix the canonical tags on the site would be your first step. Next you would want to exclude those parameters in the parameter handling section of Google Search Console. That will help by telling Google to ignore URLs with the elements you add in that section. It's another step to getting clean URLs showing up in search results.
I tried getting to http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/mens-costumes/ and realize the parameters are showing up by default like: http://www.chasing-fireflies.com/costumes-dress-up/mens-costumes/#w=*&af=cat2:costumedressup_menscostumes%20cat1:costumedressup%20pagetype:products
Are the parameters needed for every URL? Seems like this is a websphere commerce setup kind of thing.
-
Clean (w/o parameters) canonical URL helps Google to understand better your url structure and avoid several mistakes:
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.bg/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html <- mistake N:1
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dangerous-rel-canonical-problems/ <- mistake N:4So - your company that giving this advise is CORRECT! You should provide naked URLs everywhere when it's possible.
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
-
Does redirecting from a "bad" domain "infect" the new domain?
Hi all, So a complicated question that requires a little background. I bought unseenjapan.com to serve as a legitimate news site about a year ago. Social media and content growth has been good. Unfortunately, one thing I didn't realize when I bought this domain was that it used to be a porn site. I've managed to muck out some of the damage already - primarily, I got major vendors like Macafee and OpenDNS to remove the "porn" categorization, which has unblocked the site at most schools & locations w/ public wifi. The sticky bit, however, is Google. Google has the domain filtered under SafeSearch, which means we're losing - and will continue to lose - a ton of organic traffic. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with this, and appeal the decision. Unfortunately, Google's Reconsideration Request form currently doesn't work unless your site has an existing manual action against it (mine does not). I've also heard such requests, even if I did figure out how to make them, often just get ignored for months on end. Now, I have a back up plan. I've registered unseen-japan.com, and I could just move my domain over to the new domain if I can't get this issue resolved. It would allow me to be on a domain with a clean history while not having to change my brand. But if I do that, and I set up 301 redirects from the former domain, will it simply cause the new domain to be perceived as an "adult" domain by Google? I.e., will the former URL's bad reputation carry over to the new one? I haven't made a decision one way or the other yet, so any insights are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaiaslastlaugh0 -
Rel=canonical and internal links
Hi Mozzers, I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question: How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A? I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not. I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs links. Any thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unirmk0 -
Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
Hello, I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally. We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands. My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg). Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions. Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SilverStar11 -
Does a non-canonical URL pass link juice?
Our site received a great link from URL A, which was syndicated to URL B. But URL B is canonicalized to URL A. Does the link on URL B pass juice to my site? (See image below for a visual representation of my question) zgbzqBy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice1 -
How do I get rel='canonical' to eliminate the trailing slash on my home page??
I have been searching high and low. Please help if you can, and thank you if you spend the time reading this. I think this issue may be affecting most pages. SUMMARY: I want to eliminate the trailing slash that is appended to my website. SPECIFIC ISSUE: I want www.threewaystoharems.com to showing up to users and search engines without the trailing slash but try as I might it shows up like www.threewaystoharems.com/ which is the canonical link. WHY? and I'm concerned my back-links to the link without the trailing slash will not be recognized but most people are going to backlink me without a trailing slash. I don't want to loose linkjuice from the people and the search engines not being in consensus about what my page address is. THINGS I"VE TRIED: (1) I've gone in my wordpress settings under permalinks and tried to specify no trailing slash. I can do this here but not for the home page. (2) I've tried using the SEO by yoast to set the canonical page. This would work if I had a static front page, but my front page is of blog posts and so there is no advanced page settings to set the canonical tag. (3) I'd like to just find the source code of the home page, but because it is CSS, I don't know where to find the reference. I have gone into the css files of my wordpress theme looking in header and index and everywhere else looking for a specification of what the canonical page is. I am not able to find it. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (4) Went into cpanel file manager looking for files that contain Canonical. I only found a file called canonical.php . the only thing that seemed like it was worth changing was changing line 139 from $redirect_url = home_url('/'); to $redirect_url = home_url(''); nothing happened. I'm thinking it is actually specified in the .htaccess file. (5) I have gone through the .htaccess file and put thes 4 lines at the top (didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) and then at the bottom of the file (also didn't redirect or create the proper canonical link) : RewriteEngine on
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dillman
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z.]+)?threewaystoharems.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule .? http://www.%1threewaystoharems.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L] Please help friends.0 -
Rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" both necessary?
We are fighting some duplicate content issues across multiple domains. We have a few magento stores that have different country codes. For example: domain.com and domain.ca, domain.com is the "main" domain. We have set up different rel="alternative codes like: The question is, do we need to add custom rel="canonical" tags to domain.ca that points to domain.com? For example for domain.ca/product.html to point to: Also how far does rel="canonical" follow? For example if we have:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlliedComputer
domain.ca/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/sub/product.html
then,
domain.com/sub/product.html canonical to domain.com/product.html0 -
How Rel=Prev & Rel=Next work for me?
I have implemented Rel=Prev & Rel=Next tag on my website. I would like to give example URL to know more about it. http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=3 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=4 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=5 Right now, I have blocked paginated pages by Robots.txt by following query. Disallow: /*?p= I have removed disallow syntax from Robots.txt for paginated pages. But, I have confusion with duplicate page title. If you will check all 3 pages so you will find out duplicate page title across all pages. I know that, duplicate page title is harmful for SEO. Will Google crawl + index all paginated pages? If yes so which page will get maximum benefits in organic ranking? Is there any specific way which may help me to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0
