Comments on: Interesting Case Study: rel=canonical Google Fail http://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/19-10-2009/rel-canonical-tag-fail/ Search Engine Optimisation Ireland Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:03:56 +0100 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1 By: Michaelhttp://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/19-10-2009/rel-canonical-tag-fail/#comment-7110 Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:16:12 +0000 http://www.redcardinal.ie/?p=1110#comment-7110 Hi Richard,

thanks for the reference. You’re right, Google didn’t spot that the 30 or so pages were totally different, different pages title, meta description, content, images, folder and file paths etc and that the canonical url element should have only applied to the homepage at most.

There were no other factors robots file, noindex etc to signal to Google that the pages were not to be indexed.

Months passed and still it didn’t index the pages until I removed the canonical url element. Bing and Yahoo had no problem in indexing all the pages.

]]> By: Richard Hearnehttp://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/19-10-2009/rel-canonical-tag-fail/#comment-7066 Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:25:30 +0000 http://www.redcardinal.ie/?p=1110#comment-7066 Hey Kieran

I’m really not that fond of this element. I think in Michael’s case Google failed to see that the inner pages were unique. The desired behaviour is that the pages will only be replaced with the canonical if they are identical/near-identical. It’s always better to prevent problems rather than cure them.

Rgds
Richard

]]> By: searchbrathttp://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/19-10-2009/rel-canonical-tag-fail/#comment-7022 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:31:33 +0000 http://www.redcardinal.ie/?p=1110#comment-7022 ha, i get confused by my real name and my online name :) hmm that is a bad sign !!!

]]> By: Kieranhttp://www.redcardinal.ie/search-engine-optimisation/19-10-2009/rel-canonical-tag-fail/#comment-7021 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:30:39 +0000 http://www.redcardinal.ie/?p=1110#comment-7021 I would of thought it would behave the other way i.e. doesn’t really work all that well in keeping pages out of the index. I have used for duplicate content issues but I don’t see it anywhere near as effective as 301 redirect.

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