In this episode of SEO Mythbusting season 2, Martin Splitt (Developer Advocate, Google) and Rachel Costello (Technical SEO Consultant, Builtvisible, at the time of recording Technical SEO & Content Manager, DeepCrawl) discuss the most common SEO questions and myths around canonicalization.
Specific timestamped topics discussed in this episode:
Canonicalization is not a topical grouping (0:00)
The most common canonicalization myths (1:29)
Is canonicalization a directive or a signal for Google Search? (2:01)
Should canonicalization be used as a redirect? (3:08)
What are the actual factors for duplication and deduplication? (4:25)
Site’s preference for the canonical URL vs user’s preference (7:33)
Canonicalization vs unique content on pages with a canonical tag (08:59)
Documentation mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about canonicalization → https://goo.gle/2DX7OjI
Canonical URLS: How does Google pick the one? (video) → https://youtu.be/8j_hxBw5B4E
Watch more SEO Mythbusting episodes →
https://goo.gle/SEO-Mythbusting
Subscribe to Google Search Central → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral
#SEO #GoogleSearch
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Well that's all well and good. I have a website that was doing well and no real problems with GSC …. until …. I added an SSL certificate. Now GSC reported that none of my pages are indexable, there are no canonical pages due to the fact they are all duplicates. Well they're not. I have resubmitted the sitemap.xml – and learned to not have a content guide on the site that was also named sitemap.html – and have made some progress but I still see a massive number of pages that are not indexed due to "duplicate" and no canonical pages. All of the documentation on GSC is confusing on exactly what is / is not wanted. I'll get it eventually just not from Google.
There are like 3 pages about canonicalization in the google search documents. I have read every piece of content, every piece of blog post about everything in search console, still the a canonicalization is a not understood. Google can pick it, but sometimes it is hard, and bla bla crawl budget.
Please write som good subtitles. Your automatic transcript does not fetch all the mumbeling words
If google can find the canonical why should I even bother. You did not answer that. Yeah maybe Google have hard to decide, so what? I do not care about googles hardship, then they just have to code better or get faster servers. It is not my problem. As long as they pick a canonical I am fine.
You are confusing. I have read somewhere that if you do not put rel=”canonical” then google can split page rank between the two. Is that a lie or what? That must be the thing that people must be more confused about, because google can find that it is dublicate, but anyway split the page rank. What should I do with the dublicate content. You are saying the opposite to what is written in your documentation. Your videos is just about confuing. Why are you even creating these?
When you said one site is 0.51 and the other was 0.49, what was you talking about? Rank score, or something else, a signal of some sort? Is it something that you have not been writing about somewhere? I have read everything in your documention about SEO, and still I do not know what you were talking about when you said one site is 0.51 and bla bla. You are not clear when you talk. You speak in riddles, so the rest of the video became a riddle.
I'm confused why Google just said recently this was a problem when my site is a single HTML page with anchor links.
Thanks for the informative video!
Introduce myself my name is Ariful Islam leeton im software engineer and members of the international organization and members of the international health organization WHO
If a local service business has multiple pages on their websites that are just slightly different (targeting different geographic areas) is Google likely to not index any of them based on duplicate content or could Google select one of those pages as the canonical url and only index one?
I have a website I'm working on that sells solar services. I started creating location pages for all the cities that we service and it was recommended that I not create a page for the main city in our area – the one with the highest number of searches for CITYNAME + SOLAR – but instead use the home page for that primary keyword target. I really don't want to use that main city name on the home page due to the fact that we service so many cities in our area, which makes on-page SEO difficult for that primary keyword. I also don't want to keyword cannibalize the home page by creating a separate page for CITYNAME + SOLAR since we are currently ranking on the middle of page 2. So I was wondering if I could have the best of both worlds by creating a separate page for CITYNAME + SOLAR and canonicalizing it to the home page. But if you're saying the contents of the canonicalized pages must be very close to the same content, it sounds like that won't work either. Thank you for your thoughts.
Hi, just wondering if with Google`s mobile-first approach its recommended to switch canonical tags also to the mobile version?
Legends!!
lol that music at the beginning is so eerie I'm not gonna lie
Can the canonical url to be added in the script be same as the current page url ?
is that useful in any way ?
We have a indoor plant ecommerce store , we have listed one same plant in multiple listings with different pots , like for example a jade plant
1. Jade plant Small $10
2. Jade plant Big $15
3. Jade plant in a concrete pot $17
4. Jade plant with gift packaging $11
Now for all the 4 products the description of the plant remains the same. so do we need to add the canonical tag ( the link of the product 1 ) to all the other products ?
So only the first product might be visible or indexed on google ???
Is it possible to target all the products or is it better to target one out of these many ??
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"canonical tags and canonicalization is about reducing duplication" – that's canon, canonical even. 🙂
Canonicalization sounds too much like colonical
Thanks yeah i know me hv on kn this goegle okay2 yeah with me
What about keyword cannibalization?
How should I proceed when I see that another website has duplicated my content and place the rel="canonical'' as if it were the original creator of the content, but they are not
Here at BBI, we think that every page should be developed with content that is relevant, informative and search engine friendly. As web developers, when we build or upgrade a website, we always aim to ensure that SEO techniques are hard-wired into the website architecture. This video is very helpful in terms of how we can now approach canonical tags.
Why not subtitled in Portuguese?
Thanks!
i was expecting to learn more about myths around self canonicalization
Why not add discovered, crawled and indexed pages with 0 impressions on performance tab list of google search console?
Thanks for spreading useful knowledge… it all cleared my misconceptions regarding canonicalization. 🙂
I've got to say 3 points to that video:
1. Thank you very much for the explanations
2. What you (Martin) say 'bout the algos is not correct. We got sooo many problems with the .at and .de Versions and what is indexed and can be found in the right (or false) country. Let me explain – wie have a .de and a .at version of our shop. We got a bit different prices on our productdetailpages – there is no other difference. We did not canoicalized the pages – we use (correctly I guess) hreflang on it. And many of the .de-pages rank in Austria.
3. I got an additional question: I got 3 pages on my domain. Page A is a holistic presentation of a topic. Page B is 40% of the topic + 1 or 2 sentences and Page C is 60% of the topic + 1 or 2 sentences. Would it be correct to canoicalize B > A and C > A or would it be better not to use canonicals in this case?
Hello, thank you for great video. Can i ask how u can create topic in timeline video? Like: "canonicalization is not a topic grouping", or "is canonicalization a directive or signal for google..". I want to create that in my channel. Thank you for answer 🙂
Thanks for the information.
But still, I have a question:
Suppose, I have a blog post on how to START A FOOD BLOG and another one is How to START A FASHION BLOG and of course, I will talk on that specific topic rather than reapting the same info like how to start a blog.
So does this also affect CANONICALIZATION? #GoogleWebmasters
I really like this format. Its casual but packed with useful information. Looking forward to more of these videos.
Great video: i have a question though. I just switched an old website to https and created a generic 301 redirect rule via htaccess. However, search console still consider the http adresses as canonical, telling me that the https is a duplicate. I made the switch on august 3rd… maybe i just have to wait? Or do you suggest to take another action? Thanks
Does anybody having indexing issues. Google found the content but not indexing it. Don't know why.
thanks
I love these. Alot of knowledge to share on my show 😀
Again, i enjoyed this video, very clear. This is a topic hard to explain and understand.
Thank you for helping and this video
Canonicalization is probably the most misunderstood setting for site owners.
Some very useful clarifications about the misconceptions of canonicalisation!
Thanks for these
Amazing video, extremely comprehensive. Just shared with my team, thanks for breaking down to all the possibilities and solutions.
Love it! Thanks, guys. Helpful and sharing with my teams!
Great information. Thank you for helping to clear this up.