Canonicalisation query

[CommT]

Hi,

I'm in a bit of a quandary.

I have this page: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/

As you can see we have provided filters to only display Fixed rate, Tracker rate, Variable rate, High LTV and HMO products for users.

At the moment our canonical tags all point to the main Comparison page, but in order for the search feature to work dynamic urls are created. So for example on the fixed rate page (https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/) when a user puts in their search criteria the url ends up looking like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/?PrevTab=HMO&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=20&SearchId=5508

Now, my quandary is this - should I make the canonical tag for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc) like this: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/ or should I keep it at https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/ ? The comparison page shows all products, ordered by the lowest rate and with a pre-set search, limited to 20 - so not all products will be displayed on the page - and some products (like the high LTV ones) are not displayed on the main comparison landing page anyway...

Thanks,

Amelia

[DirkC]

Hi Amelia,

Don't know the mortgage business well, but I imagine that people are looking for keywords like "best fixed rate mortgage" or "10 year fixed rate mortgage" etc.

For these queries, the canonical url you use  doesn't make much sense. I would try to have url's that correspond to each of these queries - this could be done by rewriting the url's - or by using parameters.

In your case the url

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/?PrevTab=fixed-rates&PVal=250000&Amt=100000&Tme=5&SearchId=5523

could have this canonical:

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/?Tme=5
(in case you decide to keep the parameters - it's probably better to replace 'tme' by 'duration' - see also link below)
or
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/5-years
(of course, you must make sure that these canonical pages exist)

To be very honest, I think the "/compare-products/" in the url doesn't add much value - I would rather replace it by /mortgage-comparison/ or /buy-to-let-mortgage-comparison/

I would also update the H1 for each of these url's - currently it's a bit generic (Compare buy to let mortgages) - for the example above  I would change it to something like : "Mortgage comparison: Best tracker rates - 5 years" (according to Semrush 'mortgage comparison' is more popular as search term than 'compare mortgage'

There is a interesting post of webmastercentral on facetted navigation which would be worth reading: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

Hope this helps

Dirk

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Amelia

As all of these pages...

https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/fixed-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/tracker-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/variable-rates/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/high-ltv/
https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/compare-products/hmo-rates/

...are their own pages. If it were me, I would canonicalize these to themselves, not solely the compare-products page. Reason being, these are different tables, different pieces of data, different purpose pages that probably have equity of their own in search that you could potentially be missing out on.

I'd be interested to hear other opinions on this as well. That's my two cents just quickly looking at this. Hope this helps - let me know if you have any other questions!

[CommT]

Thank you - yes people do use very specific queries to find mortgages. We have landing pages for the higher volume keywords (I won't bore you with the list!!!).

I don't want to rank for 'Mortgage Comparison' as we don't offer residential mortgages - just those for business purposes (such as BTL) so although we'd get a huge amount of traffic our bounce rate would go through the roof - or we'd get enquiries we couldn't deal with which would be a waste of resource...

I appreciate your point about the H1s - and I'll get these updated as soon as I can (I think our devs need to do some stuff to the page to allow me to edit it myself) - Thank you!

Thanks again,

Amelia

[CommT]

Thank you Patrick. I think I agree with you, but I'll wait for other responses as well! It's been like this for over a month so a few more days won't harm it

Best wishes,

Amelia

[shopperlocal_DM]

IMO, your canonical tag should be for the filtered products (fixed, tracker etc).

individually all pages have different products. It's like a blog. Blogs main page has links all top 10 or 20 or all the blog posts but they have independent pages as well. So you  should not be worried about plagiarism issue here.

With this change you'll get a boost in ranking for other two three more products (fixed, tracker etc) as well. as they'll have their own dedicated pages.

canonicalizing all the products to single page is not a good idea

[CommT]

Thank you!

[CommT]

I have canonicalised the filtered products, and have put a request in to make the H1s editable so will alter those as soon as I can.

Thank you all for taking the time to answer this question, I appreciate it greatly.

Best wishes,

Amelia