Canonicalization - Some advice needed :)

[adamlcasey]

I'm trialling seoMoz at the moment and so far I have 61 duplicate content crawl errors showing in one of my campaigns. This has sent me running to my CMS provider (Hubspot) to query this.
They've advised me that they automatically sort out canonicalisation.

So I'm left in a state of not knowing where to focus.

Are Hubspot wrong or are the seoMoz reports broken?

[Marcus_Miller]

I don't believe that SEOMoz reports cover canonicalised links.

Simple test:

• Grab one page that has duplicate problems according to the report
• grab all duplicates from the spreadsheet
• Check the canonical on all

Mark - this is the same problem you will run into that I was trying to highlight above.

Marcus

[adamlcasey]

Hi Marcus

So here's what I've done...

So I've navigated like so:
Campaign>Crawl Diagnostics>Errors (68)>Duplicate Page Content Errors (61)

Once this page loads all of the links, I've clicked on one of the links and it shows

1 Error
X Duplicate Page Content
   Read More

Clicked on Read More then on the number 2 link that shows under the heading of Other URLs

This displays my two urls:

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-a

When I navigate to this page and view the source code I can see the following code:
href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" />

So I'm confused, do I have a duplicate content problem or not?

NB If I remove the trailing slash from my url it will show the same page. It does not do a redirect to the url with the slash. (I've highlighted this to Hubspot and they have said that it is not a problem?)

[Marcus_Miller]

Hard to tell for 100% without the proper URLs but I don't think so.

You have one page that works on two different URLs. The page has a canonical tag showing that the http://www.mysite.com/product-a/ is the correct version.

So, in Googles eyes:

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/
http://www.mysite.com/product-a

Are both pointing to:

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/

Due to the tag:

<link < span="">href="http://www.mysite.com/product-a/" rel="canonical" /> </link <>

There could be a bit more to this picture, if you don't want to post a link on here drop me an email to marcus@bowlerhat.co.uk and ill double check for you.

In an ideal world I would want consistency between URL's, site links and trailing slashes. I.E. If the page resolves on:

http://www.mysite.com/product-a

But is canonicalised to

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/

I would want a 301 from

http://www.mysite.com/product-a

to

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/

and all internal links to point to

http://www.mysite.com/product-a/

That's probably made it more confusing but in essence, nope, I think you are fine.

Cheers

Marcus

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Christian,

No, this wouldn't be the case because what you are telling Google there is that "http://www.example.co.uk/properties/search" is the EXACT SAME page as the "/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail/" page.

For the likes of just search pages, you don't need to have canonical URLs because they are just dynamically generated search pages. Where you DO NEED canonical URLs is on the likes of category pages, product pages, etc.

So, in the case of Mark's website, the individual property listing pages (e.g, http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606) need to have a canonical link because you could get to this page that has the EXACT SAME content with a similar URL (i don't know another URL to give the example here but a made up example could be http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606keyword=dublin).

This is why you should have search engine friendly URLs to make it easy to understand which page is which. So having http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/ as the URL instead of http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606 can make life a lot easier.

Has this helped to clear things up a bit?

Matt.

[MarkScully]

Hi Matthew, thanks for chipping in.

At the moment we do have canonical URLs setup for property listings such as the example you given above.

We'll still be going ahead with cleaning up the URL structure and ensuring categories following the correct practice as well.

[MatthewBarby]

No problem.

I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.

Matt.

[MarkScully]

Will do - cheers Matthew

I'll probably take you up on that offer.

[Ci3reR]

Hi Matthew,

Thanks very much for your explanation. I think I get to understand it better now

Many thanks,

Christian

[aalcocer2003]

Hello Mathew and Mark congrats for the great support and highlights.

In the light of what you are explaning here could you please supoport me in this question concerning Canonical or 301 redirect? My issue is in terms of SEO when doing canolical.

I have a page with a long post title and url path name (more than 70 caracters and 115). This page has many visits but I am changing the SEO website structure according to SEOMOz and forums guidelines for the length names so: I WILL CREATE A DUPLICATE PAGE WITH THE SAME INFO.

This issue has been marked as an issue in the SEO tools, for long names>70 and url path names>115

My question is which option should I use and you would recommend me?

1. OPTION 1: Ideally I would like to keep the old post, so I should use the canonical tag, but my main concern is if the search engines in terms of SEO, even the canonical has been done, will penalise my SEO as there is still a post with bad SEO optimising, or if this is not the case because I already used the canonical. The duplicate content would still exist!

2. OPTION 2: Eliminate the post and redirection 301 to the new page to keep the juice.

I would prefer option 1, as I keep both post and page, but only if searchengines do not penalise my SEO as they detect a long post name and url path name.

Thank you very much for the help,

Antonio

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Antonio,

I hope you're well and not pulling your hair out in frustration just yet.

There are a few factors that you need to consider before making a decision on this:

1. Would changing the URL of the post give more traffic through the search engine than you are currently getting?

2. How would this impact the existing links that have been built to the original URL.

Remember that if you are going to change the URL of a page, this will just look like a new webpage to Google. All of the Facebook likes, Google+ +1's, links, etc will be going to the previous URL. Not only that, if you do a 301 redirect to the new URL, you will only transfer some of the link juice that you have made.

URL changes really should be a last resort and need to be thought out properly at the start of the webpage creation. In the case of Mark (above), I have recommended that he change the URLs because they are all dynamic and the benefit of changing these pages vs not, wins.

Let me know the URL of the page in question and I will take a look and tell you what I think.

Matt.

[adamlcasey]

Hi Marcus thanks for your help so far. I've emailed you my URL's for a better look at the issue I'm facing.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, as per the email, it is exactly as above.

We can check the two versions of the URLs.

Confirm they both have the same canonical URL

then check both URLs using the info:URL command in Google to verify that in both instances, with and without final slash, the URL returned as indexed includes the final slash as per the canonical.

Any problems, give me  a shout!
Marcus

[MarkScully]

What's everyones opinion canonicali URL being setup site-wide?

[Dr-Pete]

Seems like Matt and Marcus have you on the right track. With a real-estate site, duplicates and near-duplicates are very common, since you're adding and removing properties all the time and there are many search options and categories. I do agree that search-friendly URLs, long-term, where each property has a fixed URL, are definitely the best bet. In the meantime, though, a solid canonical structure helps a lot.

Ease into it - don't go sitewide in one fell swoop without a plan, unless you're having clear ranking problems. Start with your biggest problem areas, monitor/measure, and work from there. You can always check for indexed duplicates by running a Google search like:

site:daft.ie intitle:"176 Rathgar Road"

In this case, I'm not seeing any index issues, although I think Matt's concerns are valid.

I'd also consider rel=prev/next for search results pages, as that can help focus Google, too. Again, take it one step at a time and start with the biggest problems. It'll mitigate your risk all around.