Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

[2CDev]

Can someone explain the difference between these two things? We have sites that were built prior to the feature being introduced on the template, that use the head tag to keep Google from sucking up duplicate content when products are in more than one CTGY. Is the feature in Miva different, or the same. Pros and Cons?

Thanks!

[Brennan]

Re: Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

Hey Holly -

They are actually two completely unrelated things.

The canonical tag is a meta tag you put in the head of your web page to tell Google and the other search engines what the default URL to a page is.

Say for example you have two url's to the same product but one passes additional parameters. You would add the canonical tag to tell Google that one of the URLs is the default.

The Miva Canonical Category field, is used for the category tree and breadcrumbs when the category code is not available. Say for example you search for a product. Because you didn't navigate to the product via the category tree, Miva has no idea what category the product is from. If you have the Canonical category defined for that product, Miva will use that category to populate the breadcrumbs and category tree.

[2CDev]

Re: Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

Ah, thanks. That makes sense, Rick. I do have one other question on this. I have worked on a site over the last year that had thousands of pages indexed in Google, but many of them were duplicates, due to the product assignment thing mentioned above. We added the tag to the head and of course, it reduced the number of indexed pages. Also at the same time, we did a LOT of clean up of bad SEO tactics. I mean a LOT. It was a matter of just when Google would have caught on, in their own time, or because we kind of flagged the site by doing so much cleanup. Google did catch on.

The end result of all of it over the last year has been large changes in numbers of pages indexed, as well as some other SEO Loss. Rankings for main keywords have done their usual up or down a few notches, as usual, but nothing has fallen off the map, or anything close to that. And we have avoided all actual penalties.

We are convinced that continued addition of compelling content using the proper keywords (and to stop over optimizing for the one main keyword that he optimized the whole site for for years, will do the trick eventually, but the client is blaming us for doing something to "harm" his site. We feel like we saved his site from oblivion.

Anyone have anything to add to this? Have we missed something? Anything else to look into as to why Google is reducing the number of indexed pages? We feel it is the fact that he optimized for one keyword and all those pages like that are still the majority of this pages. The pages of content with other related terms have not take over yet, as you can only post so many blog posts at a time and not have Google flag you for large changes.

[2CDev]

Re: Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

Sorry, I meant, thanks, Brennan. I saw the Miva logo and Rick jumped to mind.

One other question. This is the tag we are using. It was the going rate at the time. Is there a better one to use?

<mvt:if expr="g.Screen EQ 'PROD'">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.chessusa.com/product/&mvta:product:code;.html" />
<mvt:elseif expr="g.Screen EQ 'CTGY'">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.chessusa.com/category/&mvta:category:code;.html" />
<mvt:elseif expr="g.Screen EQ 'SFNT'">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.chessusa.com/" />
<mvt:else>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.chessusa.com/&mvta:global:screen;.html" />
</mvt:if>

[Brennan]

Re: Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

That is the correct canonical tag. Just make sure to update the URL structure to match what they use on the site.

[Pete McNamara]

Re: Canonical Tag vs Canonical CTGY Feature on Template

Possible causes of reduced number of indexed pages:

1. Actual duplicates that hadn't yet been recognized by Google duplicates, which you correctly addressed as duplicates i.e. just because they were working "yesterday" does not mean they would be working "today" if you had changed nothing.

2. Since the end of the first week in May, there have been 2 Penguin updates and one Panda and one Phantom update, all of which have had significant effects. Updates to the algorithm of this significance used to occur once a year, if that. Now, there have been 4 within 3 months. Your client needs to understand that the "good old days" for SEO are finished and the search engines have moved from just attacking black hat tactics to also attacking gray hat tactics and in some cases light gray and white hat (collateral damage). It is possible that one or more of these updates have contributed to the loss and also possible that had you not done what you have done, that the loss would have been similar or worse.

Correlation does not imply causation. The fact of the matter is that unless you can precisely determine what caused the bulk of the losses (which would probably require a large and expensive investigation (and for what benefit?)), correlating your work with the loss of traffic, when so many other significant algorithm changes have occurred is less than optimal reasoning, in my view.

Pete