Hot answers tagged canonical-url
28
There's no circularity implied by having <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.example.com/product/foo' /> appear as http://www.example.com/product/foo.
That's the intent. You're saying "the best URL" for this page is http://www.example.com/product/foo, so when the search engines hit http://www.example.com/product/foo?id=1, or ...
15
All questions on Stack Exchange contain a numeric ID (28070 for this question) which is the only thing that uniquely identifies a question.
So when a question title is changed, the URL such as /28070/old-question-title still shows the question because the ID is still there. The ID is looked up and the new title returned, meaning that the new URL can be ...
10
If you don't specifically tell Google your preference you will probably have duplicate content issues. There is more then one way to inform Google of your preferred domain:
Do a 301 redirect to use the 'www' or no 'www'
Specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools
Use canonical URLs (although it isn't typically used in this situation)
9
I get that it conforms to the strict ISO rules, but why?
There are different operating systems behind the various servers on the net, and for some of them a directory or file named page is not the same as one named Page. The result is that those really are two different locations and not even necessarily the same type of location(dir/page). The web ...
8
I don't think Canonical is the correct way as you are essentially that the correct url for that page is the new one, as it is different content I think it may conflict.
Personally I think the easiest way if you want to keep the old post is the link at the top of the page.
Also if you remove the page from google it will be removed and not replaced so you ...
8
No. The canonical element is supposed to resolve duplicate content issues on your site stemming from multiple URLs that pull up the same content. Telling the search engines to go to two different places off the same page totally defeats the purpose.
My guess is the company is having some issues internally. It might be their CMS builds composite pages from ...
7
No offense intended, but Case Sensitivity is VITAL to urls today - they are used millions of times a day:
bit.ly
http://bit.ly/ri2LhQ
http://bit.ly/ri2LHq
Two vastly different sites - only possible because of case sensitivity
7
About a year ago Google tackled this problem by creating Source Attribution meta tags:
syndication-source: this meta tag is used to point to the long-lived (bookmarkable) URL of the original article. This should be used on all pages that republish the syndicated content, but it can also be used on the original page to point to itself as the syndication ...
6
As long as that url redirects to the main url (and wipes the referrer parameters itself, which you can check by just following the link) or that parameter is set in google webmaster tools to be ignored by googlebot (which is only easy to find out if you're the owner of the site, really), it should make essentially no difference.
Otherwise you could resort ...
6
You should not use the canonical this way, paginated listing are well understood by Google. You can help him to make it clear : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
6
Personally I would do the opposite canonical - ie set /texas/houston as canon instead of /houston - the main reason being to avoid name clashes with identical names in other states. A URL of /springfield could be a little confusing, even if you are showing a specific Springfield page. You also get an extra keyword in the URL.
Secondly, I would always prefer ...
6
New sites often do drop in rank
Sadly the chances are that Google is repositioning to where it believes you should be, most often new sites and pages get temporary boosts to allow them to catch on so to speak. I've seen what your experiencing hundreds of times and can assure you what your seeing is most likely out of your control until your site becomes ...
5
This is not a Google policy, they are basics rules.
From a windows user point of view it is difficult to understand case-sensitive filenames. However, under unix/linux systems, pAge and page are not the same files nor directories, and so on webservers.
The trailing slash is a configuration issue (or choice).
Keep in mind that on most web servers, the ...
5
Given the incredible popularity of Google (it is 90% of incoming traffic on Stack Overflow, for example), couldn't you simply check the referer?
Example referer strings from search engines:
www.bing.com/search?q=javascript+date+to+timestamp&src=IE-SearchBox&FORM=IE8SRC
...
5
According to RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1), section 3.2.2, the URLs http://www.example.com and http://www.example.com/ are equivalent, and HTTP clients must normalize the former to the latter before sending the request to the server:
"If the abs_path is not present in the URL, it MUST be given as "/" when used as a Request-URI for a resource (section 5.1.2)."
...
4
RewriteRule ^$ /index.html [L]
This will tell Apache to treat the hit to the yoursite.com as hit to yoursite.com/index.html without redirecting (URL stays the same).
The code you already have (last 2 lines) tells Apache to redirect not www-prefixed url to one with www in front (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/somepage.html => ...
4
That's a use of canonicalization, and arguably the most important one, but from the Webmaster Tools content guidelines, pagination:
You can also add a rel="canonical" link to the component pages to tell Google that the View All version is the version you want to appear in search results.
Even more specific to your example above, the use case is that ...
4
If you have the same content being pulled up by multiple URLs you will need to use canonical URLs so search engines will know which URL is the primary URL for that content
You should only list the primary URL in your XML sitemap as listing all of the duplicate URLs will not benefit you since you know only the primary URL will be listed in the search results ...
4
The canonical tag tells spiders and other automated thingies that all URLs that return pages with the same tag are all effectively returning the exact same page. I don't think you want to tell robots that your UK and US pages are identical unless they really are. Do they show different currency? Do they maybe even spell words differently?
Furthermore, ...
4
Yes and No. The rel="canonical" will avoid the duplicate content issue. However, this particular situation is best resolved with a 301 redirect.
foo.htm and foo.htm?parameter=1 are both legitimate URLs that are used on the site, but foo.htm is probably the preferred (canonical) URL.
Whereas only 1 of www.example.com and example.com should be accessible - ...
3
Nofollow doesn't stop Google from crawling pages, it stops any 'link juice' being passed to those pages.
Robots.txt is what you want to prevent google from crawling pages.
http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html
3
I see that this issue is sorting itself out now. You can test by doing an info: query on Google like this which brings up the new URL.
The thing about the canonical tag is that it’s a directive which means it doesn’t work 100% of the time. 301 redirects are the same – they don’t always pass 100% of the weight through the redirect.
Also with either of ...
3
According the same page you linked to rel="canonical" is only a suggestion and not a directive:
Is rel="canonical" a suggestion or a directive?
This new option lets site owners suggest the version of a page that Google should treat as canonical. Google will take this into account, in conjunction with other signals, when determining which URL sets ...
3
CNAME records that point to other
CNAME records should be avoided due to
their lack of efficiency, but are not
an error. The following example is not
recommended:
foo.example.com. CNAME bar.example.com.
Nevertheless this is the very common practice:
example.com (@) is done via "A" record (obviously)
www, ftp etc subdomains are done via ...
3
You would think so, however Google has explicitly stated that the rel=canonical link element is a hint for search engines - as opposed to a directive (such as a redirect).
We have implemented rel-con on a site with 2+ million pages indexed and see a large proportion of non-canonical URLs indexed. I believe this may correct over time, but at this stage ...
3
Those will absolutely be considered two different pages. Just one character is all it takes to make two URLs different. Canonical URLs are commonly used for different query strings that product the same content but file extension is no different. Definitely use canonical URLs for pages like that.
3
The first one is correct. There is a meta tag for acknowledging the original work if you republish content but that is something else entirely.
3
You could also do what stackoverflow does, which is a hybrid approach:
http://example.com/questions/1234/question-name-slug
That way you've got a page that has the title in the url, but has a permanent piece of identifying info there as well (the question id). This way the title can be changed, and users arriving at the old URL can get redirected to the ...
3
My understanding is that words within the URL that match search terms are considered "good quality" matches.
I certainly see lots of matches based on URL when I go searching for technology specific answers involving Jargon.
By using the node id link instead of a content-based URL, I think you'll match less well, if only marginally. But, I have no ...
3
Canonical URLs are to be used when two different URLs can be used to pull up the same content. If your URL rewriting causes this to happen then canonical URLs will be necessary.
So if:
www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments
pulls up the same content as
www.mysite.com/city=london&area=kensington&typeapartments
then you need canonical URLs
...
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