Integration of canonical urls - will it hit current rankings?

Integration of canonical urls - will it hit current rankings? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, web-development, canonical-url to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Integration of canonical urls - will it hit current rankings?.Problem :

I have a site that has seen large organic growth over the year. But in Moz, there's one major issue: the site is creating duplicate content. Because there are several versions of the homepage (targeted at certain countries):

• example.com (default)


• example.com/en (English)


• example.com/nz


• etc.

Now in robots.txt these country extensions are blocked, but Google is indexing them anyway.

So what happens is that some of our high ranking keywords are pointing to example.com/blogpost and for other keywords we are ranking with example.com/en/blogpost

So as canonical urls will (probably?) resolve the duplicate content issue, I'm worried that we will lose any rankings that involve urls with the country extension.

How to tackle this?

Solution :

In order to indicate to Google that you want a certain version of the page to be served to searchers using Google in that country for example,

A German version of the site to only be displayed to people using Google in Germany.

You will need to use:

rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

Use 'x' to identify alternative language versions for the site.

rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is used at a page level, not at a site level so you will need to mark up each set of pages, including the homepage, as necessary.

A final example may look like this.

rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="http://de.example.com/seite.html" 

This should ensure that you won't lose rankings, and the page should rank for the country it's intended for.

If the issue about seo, google-search, web-development, canonical-url is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.