My Ave. position and ranking is dropping!
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Hi,
I added canonicals last two days, and made a tiny change is our meta titles. (adding a secondary keyword). Now my ave. position and visibility has dropped very much. Can it be canonicals or is it the keywords? Can canonicals affect the website so quickly?
My other question is can it be temporarily so should I wait more? how long?
I should mention that our website content is not really good and I'm working on it. When I added meta tags we had a big jump in our ranking and then we stopped getting better,. But now we are going down! Can it be the content? Sorry I know that it is actually all, but i do not know which one matters more and do not understand why it happened immediately after adding canonicals.
Our website is: www.pacificsmoke.com
Appreciate your advice.
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I'd start with the canonicals. They're not set correctly.
Your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com) has a canonical of www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It's missing the "https://" in front and "/home" should be dropped from the end.
The English version of your home page (https://www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/en/) is canonicalized to www.pacificsmoke[dot]com/home. It too is missing the "https://" in front and should be canonicalized to itself.
I'm assuming because of the /en/ page at the end of the page above and your location (in Canada) that you plan on creating a French version of the page. If that is the case, you will also need to introduce hreflang tags. If that's not the case, the /en/ page is a duplicate and should be removed.
If you need help with hreflang tags, Gaston Riera previously answered in a question in Q&A about hreflang tags and listed a bunch of helpful resources. You can find them here - https://moz.com/community/q/hreflang-tags-and-canonical-tags-might-be-causing-indexing-and-duplicate-content-issues.
Other pages may have similar problems.
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I had a client with the same issues and yes, canonicals are a huge problem. You should sort that out first and see how the website reacts with rankings. Google is really punishing websites with errors these days and canonicals are some of the worst ones.
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I appreciate your detailed answer Donna! Very helpful
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Thank you so much Alex. Appreciate your help and advice.
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Hi,
I have another question and very much appreciate your advice. Are the following hreflang tags correct? Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale. In this case, I do not understand why I should add hreflang.
For our homepage:
And an example for other pages:
Should I use instead of rel="canonical"?
Any advice would be a great help.
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"Are the following hreflang tags correct? "
Yes
"Or now that we do not have french version yet, should I delete the first line? Because, for instance, we do not have such a URL yet: https://www.pacificsmoke.com/fr/wholesale."
You don't need to add any hreflang tags until you add translated pages. I only mentioned them because you have an /en/ page and you're in Canada. If you don't plan on adding translated pages, then you don't need the /en/ page and you don't need hreflang tags.
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Thanks Donna a ton
