Rel canonical with index follow on query string URLs

[panini]

Hi guys,

Quick question regarding the rel canonical tag.

I have lots of links pointing at me with query strings and previously used some code to determine if query strings were in the URL and if they were then not to index that page. If there weren't query strings then the page would be indexed and followed.

I assume I can now use the rel canonical tag on each of these pages so the value goes to the proper URL minus any query string. However do I need to have the rel canonical tag above the index, follow tag on the page?

So URL is site.com/page.html?ref=ABC

meta robots is "index, follow"

Rel canonical is "site.com/page.html"

Does the order of the meta robots and canonical tag matter?

Thanks in advance!

[oznappies]

It shouldn't, but I would always place rel canonical as the first line to ensure that it is indexed first and all references are relative to that. This is a developer preference as it is a good design practice. This works on pages we host and create. You should also inform webmaster tool of any parameters you use and to ignore them,even though you have the rel canonical.

[RyanKent]

Hi Panini.

The location of the canonical tag does not matter as long as it is somewhere within the tags.

A couple extra notes:

• the "index, follow" tag is not required. That is the default behavior of crawlers. I would suggest not adding that information as it is unnecessary code

• you can specify in Google Webmaster Tools how you wish parameters to be treated. From your WMT dashboard > Site Configurations > Settings > Parameter handling tab. Bing has a similar setting in their webmaster's tools section.

[panini]

Thanks for the responses guys.

@oznappies: I'll have the canonical line at the top for best practices and so it's visible.

@Ryan - My CMS has the option to noindex/nofollow too as there are some pages we don't want indexed. Thanks for the heads up about the WMT/Bing method though.