Rel=canonical on Godaddy Website builder

[Answer2cancer]

Hey crew!

First off this is a last resort asking this question here. Godaddy has not been able to help so I need my Moz Fam on this one.

So common problem

My crawl report is showing I have duplicate home pages www.answer2cancer.org and www.answer2cancer.org/home.html

I understand this is a common issue with apache webservers which is why the wonderful rel=canonical tag was created! I don't want to go through the hassle of a 301 redirect of course for such a  simple issue.

Now here's the issue. Godaddy website builder does not make any sense to me. In wordpress I could just go add the tag to the head in the back end. But no such thing exist in godaddy. You have to do this weird drag and drop html block and drag it somewhere on the site and plug in the code. I think putting before the code instead of just putting it in there. So I did that but when I publish and inspect in chrome I cannot see the tag in the head!

This is confusing I know. the guy at godaddy didn't stand a chance lol.

Anyway much love for any replies!

[KaneJamison]

I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.

Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.

You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.

Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.

[Everett]

Thomas,

I agree with everything Kane suggested. Additionally, you might ask GoDaddy if you can add some Google Tag Manager code to the site so you can edit header and body code without messing with Godaddy's website builder. It might be a learning curve for you, but Google has good documentation and courses on how to use GTM.

[KaneJamison]

Good call on GTM - I always forget about the ability to add normal HTML snippets.

[Answer2cancer]

Guys your not going to believe this but neither of those two things are possible on godaddy website builder. Maybe I should just pack up the gloves and chalk this one for a loss. Does it really even matter? Could the crawl report be wrong? These are the things that keep me up at night.

[KaneJamison]

Sadly I completely believe you.

If it's not cost or time prohibitive, I'd recommend moving to Godaddy's Wordpress hosting package and rebuild the site in Wordpress, which won't have these problems. Godaddy might even offer a conversion package of some kind.

Otherwise you might try a website builder option like Squarespace instead, which is also fairly decent for basic SEO considerations like this.

[rhondafranklin]

Thomas,

I am on GoDaddy's Website Builder as well and had the exact same issue that brought me to this thread.  I did what they suggested and it got rid of my crawler seeing a duplicate with the home.html page.

Here is what I did:

1. In ALL menu navigations, I replaced the links to home.html with the root URL of my domain (like http://myurl.com)  I had to do this for my main navigation at the top of my website and then a footer navigation that I had.
2. Then, for my logo image in my header, I had to change the link from the home.html page to the same root URL.

After I did this, I did a recrawl and now home.html is not being found and therefore, not showing up as a duplicate.

Would have been nice to have been able to put in a canonical reference but you get what you get and for the flexibility of Website Builder for a quick website, I'll take the extra work to get it just right

Good luck!

-Rhonda

[Everett]

Thanks Rhonda! It sounds like this thread will benefit many people then.