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://azwa.1clkaccess.in/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
-
Url shows up in "Inurl' but not when using time parameters
Hey everybody, I have been testing the Inurl: feature of Google to try and gauge how long ago Google indexed our page. SO, this brings my question. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com all of our domains show up. If we run inurl:https://mysite.com/specialpage the domain shows up as being indexed If I use the "&as_qdr=y15" string to the URL, https://mysite.com/specialpage does not show up. Does anybody have any experience with this? Also on the same note when I look at how many pages Google has indexed it is about half of the pages we see on our backend/sitemap. Any thoughts would be appreciated. TY!
On-Page Optimization | | HashtagHustler1 -
Does Google penalize you for reindexing multiple URLS?
Hello, Just a quick, question! I was wanting to know if multiple page indexing (site overhaul) could cause a drop in organic traffic ranking or be penalized by Google for submitting multiple pages at one time. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | InternetRep0 -
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 -
How does Google treat Dynamic Titles?
Let's say my website can be accessed in only 3 states Colorado, Arizona and Ohio. I want to display different information to each visitor based on where they are located. For this I would also like the title to change based on their location. Not quite sure how Google we treat the title and rank the site.... Any resources you can provide would be helpful. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Firestarter-SEO0 -
Any idea how Google is doing this? Is it schematic? http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/28/google-adds-full-restaurant-menus-to-its-search-results-pages/
Google is now showing menus on select searches. Any idea how they are getting this information? I would like to make sure my clients get visibility this way.
On-Page Optimization | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Category page canonical tag
I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice. Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page. There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example: /range.html?p=2
On-Page Optimization | | crichardson9
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price Is it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag? After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated. Chris.1 -
How to properly remove pages and a category from Google's index
I want to remove this category http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ and all the pages in that category (e.g. http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/7386.html ) from Google's index. I used the following string in the "Reomval URS" section in Google Webmaster Tools: http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/* is that correct or I better use http://www.webdesign.org/web-design-news-all/ ? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | VinceWicks0 -
URL for location pages
Hello all We would like to create clean, easy URLs for our large list of Location pages. If there are a few URLs for each of the pages, am I right when I'm saying we would like this to be the canonical? Right now we would like the URL to be: For example
On-Page Optimization | | Ferguson
Domain.com/locations/Columbus I have found some instances where there might be 2,3 or more locations in the same city,zip. My conclusion for these would be: adding their Branch id's on to the URL
Domain.com/locations/Columbus/0304 Is this an okay approach? We are unsure if the URL should have city,State,zip for SEO purposes?
The pages will have all of this info in it's content
BUT what would be best for SEO and ranking for a given location? Thank you for any info!0
