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.
Two different canonical tags on one page
-
Due to an error, some of my pages now have two canonical tags on them. One is correct and the other goes to a nonsense URL (404 page).
I know I should ideally remove the incorrect ones, but it's a big manual job. Are they doing any harm? Can I just leave them there and let Google figure it out?
The correct ones are higher up in the code. Will this make a difference?
Any help appreciated.
-
Unfortunately, what Google can do and what they actually do can really vary. If you're mixing signals and doubling up the canonicals, the odds that they'll get it right are pretty low, in my experience. I think it's worth the fix, if these are traffic-generating pages.
-
You should certainly fix this. You don't want google having to guess what you are trying to tell them. For the most part they will probably get it right, especially in your case with the 404s. But if this is occurring too frequently then they may begin to ignore your canonicals all together. Or worse, you may loose some google trust.
I'd put this on my fix it list.
-
Thanks Scott. It's only wrong on a few hundred pages and they're all quite deep. If it were wrong on the important pages I'd fix it.
-
You should change it, I'm no canonical expert, but the whole point of having it is to tell google how you want it to show, ex. www.yoursite.com or yoursite.com. If your not going to change it for all of your pages then at least do it for your home page as this is the one that usually gets the most attention.
-
Well that's good news. Think I'll just leave them there then. Thanks!
-
This is stright from Google Webmasters:
"What happens if rel="canonical" points to a non-existent page? Or if more than one page in a set is specified as the canonical version?
We'll do our best to algorithmically determine an appropriate canonical page, just as we've done in the past."
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Hope that helps
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
-
Two websites, one company, one physical address - how to make the best of it in terms of local visibility?
Hello! I have one company which will be operating in two markets, printing and website design / development. I’m planning on building two websites, each for every market. But I’m a bit confused about how to optimize these websites locally. My thought is to use my physical address for one website (build citations, get listed in directories, etc. ) and PO Box for another. Do you think there is a better idea?
Technical SEO | | VELV1 -
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 -
Canonical for duplicate pages in ecommerce site and the product out of stock
I’m an SEO for an ecommerce site that sells shoes I have duplicate pages for different colors of the same product (unique URL for each color), Conventionally I have added canonical tags for each page, which direct to a specific product URL My question is what happens when a product which the googlbot is direct to, is out of stock but is still listed in the canonical tag ?
Technical SEO | | shoesonline0 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
Duplicate content on Product pages for different product variations.
I have multiple colors of the same product, but as a result I'm getting duplicate content warnings. I want to keep these all different products with their own pages, so that the color can be easily identified by browsing the category page. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | bobjohn10 -
Determining When to Break a Page Into Multiple Pages?
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page. Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
Technical SEO | | ProjectLabs1 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0