14
votes
Accepted
Should query strings be included or removed from the canonical tag?
Query parameters can be used for many purposes. Some of them don't specify the page content and some of them do. If the query parameter is used to specify the content loaded onto the page, then it ...
- 93.5k
10
votes
URLs with "space", "%20", "+" are canonicals?
Spaces in URLs should be encoded. That would eliminate foo abc.jpg as the canonical.
Here is a question that addresses how the space should be encoded: In a URL, should spaces be encoded using %...
- 93.5k
10
votes
Accepted
Do query string case differences affect whether a URL is Canonical?
URLs that differ in case in the query string are different URLs to search engines. They are not considered equal and would need canonical tags or redirects to tell search engines which you prefer.
...
- 93.5k
10
votes
Accepted
How to avoid robots from indexing pages of my app through alternate URLs?
It happen that Googlebot discovers the alternate URL. The official way if you want your application to be accessible through all those URLs for internal purposes, is to use canonical links as you ...
- 5,867
8
votes
Accepted
Will canonical tag referencing unsecure HTTP URLs on a HTTPS page cause the unsecure message?
Web browsers do not care about canonical URLs. It is for search engine use only (specifically Google).
Additionally, canonical URLs do not affect the loading or rendering of a web page. So no assets ...
- 85.7k
8
votes
Accepted
Is it legal republish any article with Credits and Canonical Link?
No it is not legal. It is copyright infringement to copy and republish any article without the proper license to do so. Noting the source and adding a canonical does not in any way limit your legal ...
- 93.5k
7
votes
Accepted
Should URL paths be case sensitive?
Two of the most widely used operating system file systems for serving web content have have very different settings for case sensitivity of URLs by default. Whether or not your URLs are case ...
- 93.5k
7
votes
HTTP to HTTPS: Wait for new sitemap to be indexed?
Google will never index HTTPS while the canonicals point to HTTP. I switched my largest site over to HTTPS using the following protocol:
Enabled HTTPS for the site without switching canonicals for ...
- 93.5k
6
votes
Should an ID go at the beginning or end of the URL for SEO?
Putting the ID near the beginning of a URL is better than putting it near the end.
URLs often get truncated in emails or by CMS systems that show them to users. When the ID is at the end the ...
- 93.5k
6
votes
Accepted
Should an ID go at the beginning or end of the URL for SEO?
From the SEO prospective, i bet there might be a difference:
In you first example, the ID is separated from the title, making it clear to the crawler it is a different resource (as the / character ...
- 222
6
votes
Accepted
Landing page on multi language site: Canonical AND x-default
It is a confusing state of affairs, but here are some pointers:
Don't use the canonical tag in the way you were thinking. Content translated into several languages is not duplicate content. So you ...
- 486
6
votes
Accepted
Is it possible for Google to disregard my canonical tag?
Early 2018 update to Google Search Console will now tell you if it's overridden a page with a different canonical:
Google chose different canonical than user: This URL is marked as canonical for a ...
- 2,727
6
votes
Preventing URLs ending in "/" from search engine indexes with robots.txt or rewrite rule
rewrite ^/$ ? permanent;
This would only match the document root (a valid request) - this isn't a URL that ends with a slash, but a URL that starts with a slash.
Try something like the following ...
- 4,267
6
votes
Accepted
When an attribute value ends in a slash, can I omit the quotes? It looks confusing when the trailing slash is next to the closing angle bracket
Here is what the HTML spec says about using unquoted attribute values:
An unquoted attribute value is specified by providing the following parts in exactly the following order:
an attribute name
...
- 93.5k
5
votes
Does URL encoding create duplicate content?
Your "SEO expert" might be a lying bastard, but this probably isn't the reason. He's absolutely right about this. This is a little known edge case in URL construction.
RFC 3986 is the ...
- 951
5
votes
Accepted
How to specify the canonical URL for downloadable versions of the page (doc, pdf, txt, etc)
Google allows you to specify the canonical as an HTTP header. They give an example for canonicalizing one PDF file to another:
Link: <http://www.example.com/downloads/white-paper.pdf>; rel="...
- 93.5k
5
votes
How to correctly mark up different versions of the same document which are non-canonical
given your question I have to make the following assumptions:
your website is offering a section for install-guides for a product
guides differ from product version but stay relevant for customers ...
- 626
5
votes
Accepted
Is "site:" returning pages that would not otherwise be returned?
<meta rel="canonical"
type="text/html"
title="Home Page"
href="https://exdox.com"/>
This is incorrect. This should be a link element, not a meta element. For example:
<link rel="...
- 40.9k
5
votes
Accepted
How to avoid hreflang return errors with URL that contain parameters
The problem you have is caused by the combination of canonical and hreflang.
Your setup
Given your example: for the URL https://example.com/au/publications?count=50&page=4 you specify the ...
- 626
4
votes
Accepted
Rel=canonical from product to category
The reason to use the rel=canonical shouldn't be the term users use to get to the site, but the content.
If each page has different content and/or different reason to exist, like index and content, ...
- 2,432
4
votes
canonical or redirecting
The redirect is the better solution, as it stops the erroneous URLs ever being linked to or shared, and so should help crawl efficiency (i.e., search engines shouldn't have to crawl multiple non-...
- 7,731
4
votes
Accepted
Does noindex metatag have a negative effect on the canonical URLs PageRank?
You should not use both noindex and rel=canonical, because noindex won't let pages pass any PageRank to its canonical version.
rel="canonical" is a hint, not a directive, so Google will decide ...
- 881
4
votes
Accepted
Website opening both on domain name and IP. Is that a problem?
You may run into issues with duplicate content. You probably do not want to create canonical tags when they are not necessary. Too much work.
You can try a redirect:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^192\.0\...
- 32.5k
4
votes
Should URL paths be case sensitive?
Here is Google's position from an archived live chat session (the link is now dead):
*Does inconsistent capitalization of URLs cause duplicate content issues and dilution of page rank? For example ...
- 3,047
4
votes
Should an ID go at the beginning or end of the URL for SEO?
For SEO, I would say an id doesn't permit to easy remember the URL for users. Therefore, no matter on which URL you choose; an id in the middle or at the end of an URL doesn't change anything ...
- 10k
4
votes
What is the difference between canonical and 301 redirects?
When you use 301 redirect, you show to Google that current page it's permanently moved to another url.
Cannonical is used to prevent penalties by Google for duplicate content. When you use it, the ...
- 181
4
votes
Accepted
Do canonical URLs disappear from the search results?
Setting a rel="canonical" doesn't necessarily prevent both (canonical and non-canonical) URLs from being "indexed", but it indicates a preference as to which URL should be returned in the SERPs.
If ...
- 40.9k
4
votes
Do query string case differences affect whether a URL is Canonical?
Yes, all parts of URL after the domain name are case sensitive.
Also, query string case is important not just for search engines but it may be important for your server as well.
You may have the ...
- 1,316
4
votes
Accepted
Do I need to put rel="canonical" in the original page?
It's highly recommended. Google will probably understand what you mean without it, but it's highly encouraged to add it to all pages with the same content including the canonical page itself.
- 2,727
4
votes
Will meta setting Meta="NOINDEX" eventually remove page from Google index?
I am not sure if your theory is good because it is based on a very big assumption that your new website will take the credit for your old site after deindexing. Except rel="canonical", you don't have ...
- 1,316
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible