Canonical link attribute

They have: 9 posts

Joined: Apr 2009

Hello All!

I have got a problem with my website pet-health-pro.com, where the home page is being indexed, but all other ca. 100 pages not. It is high quality, unique content and some of the non-indexed pages got a PR4.
The site is live for one year now and when I google site:pet-health-pro.com all that comes up is the home page, some support-files (pdf), cgbins and captcha pages.

I contacted my hosting support already a few times about this during the last 6 months and was told to be patient, wait and see, because we all know, SE's need time....
Now, this is not anymore an option for me, I need to get this site indexed.

In the head section of each page is a link rel=" canoncial " href="" - element, and somebody thought this could be the problem for all the other content pages not becoming indexed.

I am now totally confused about what to do and would like to ask for help.
What needs to be altered? What can I do with this? Any suggestions and advice?

Cheers,
olecranon

Greg K's picture

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

That is most likely the problem. Our SEO team recently had me add the canocial tag to any page on sites that utilizing paging, so that they do not get indexed. As explained to me, this tells the search engines, "Hey this is a duplicate (main content) of another page, go here (the href) and index it instead of this one"

So for our clients that have products listed on a category page, the main content does not need to be re indexed on Page 2 of 10, Page 3 of 10, etc, as it is the same core content, and will be treated as duplicate content.

Hope this helps.

-Greg

They have: 9 posts

Joined: Apr 2009

Hi Greg!

This is interesting, indeed.
So, would that mean in my case that I should alter this element link rel="canonical" href="mydomain.com/ into this instead link rel="canonical" href="mydomain.com/pageA.html"/ ?
Would this ensure that this page A will be indexed at some stage?
Or should I just delete the whole canonical element altogether from each of my pages?

Thanks again for your time !

Greg K's picture

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

From my understanding, you should not have this tag on any page that has unique content (not including this such as different paging of not main content, ie. product listings.

-Greg

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