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Does a canonical tag non-index you from Google
Posted by on May 12, 2021 at 9:23 amHey everyone,
I’m trying to target multiple locations. So by doing that I have created loads of pages with similar content (enough to be duplicates) and changing the main keywords to each location.
I’m currently using a Canonical Tag in Yoast SEO by pointing the URL back to the URL it’s currently on if that makes sense? so if it’s builders in Scotland the canonical tag will be builders-in-scotland and then each locations page will point the URL to it’s location.
I’ve just looked and it has non-indexed the 80+ pages I have built out. Am I using the tags wrong?
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Thanks.
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3 Replies
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Following
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Yes, you are using them too badly, but don’t worry, it has a solution.
The first thing is that you understand the meaning of a canonical tag and why it is not your solution.
The canonical tag (rel = “canonical”) is used to tell Google which page to INDEX AND CONSIDER from a list of other similar urls. If you read correctly, it means that if you put 80 canonical tags that point to an exact url, what will happen is that Google will only index that url and not the other 79.
Solution:
Based on what I read, what you need to do is use href lang tags, remove all your canonicals and implement href lang for each geo location where you want to show ads.
Lucky -
The point of a canonical is to explicitly and unambiguously indicate a preferred URL. If Page A is canonicalized to Page B, the instruction to search engines is ‘don’t index me, index Page B instead.’ However, canonicals consolidate and combine indexing signals, so if Page A has a noindex on it, this noindex may also get passed through to Page B.
As such, noindex and rel=canonical should not be used together.
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