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Why Would a Canonicalized Page Have Organic Traffic?
I have a set of pages on a subdomain that have rel=’canonical’ links to my main domain. They have very similar content to each of the page they are canonicaled to, but I want them still accessible, just not showing up in SERPs.
In GA I’m seeing that they have about 300 organic sessions in the past 3 months.
I thought that canonicalizing them to another page made them non-indexable.
I can get them to show up in SERPs if I do a site:subdomain.mydomain.com search, and likewise if I search for their main keyword when I do a -site:www.mydomain.com search.
I do not think its likely that there are that many people searching in that way, however. What are your thoughts on why those pages are getting organic traffic?
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1 Reply
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If you change a canonical tag on the page, you then have to wait for Google / Bing to crawl the content and look for that canonical suggestion. That could mean days / weeks depending on how big your site is, so you will still get traffic to that page. Best advice is to fetch the change as soon as possible in Google and Bing to force the bots to read the canonical tag.
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Both search engines use the canonical as a suggestion, but don’t have to honor it. That is why you may see the page still in the SERP. A NOINDEX tag would effectively remove the content from Google and Bing, but it only works when both bots crawl that page. To help speed up that process, you should get in the habit of fetching the changes as soon as possible.
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