Use canonical tags on Volusion store home page to improve your Volusion SEO.
It is important to use Canonical Tags on your home page URL to ensure that your site is getting full SEO credit on search engines.
If your home page does not have the canonical tags, then www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com/default.asp will be considered duplicate content, and your store’s SEO value may will be divided between the two different URLs. This is an easy check to make sure your Volusion SEO store canonical links are enabled…
If (and you SHOULD) you implement the canonical tag for your home page, you are instructing search engines that the .com URL is the main landing page for your site, and all SEO values will be sent to the .com URL (instead of the .com/default.asp URL).
Take the example below…
in this example, my client’s Volusion store has 240 landing pages. Of those 240 pages 28.4% of visitors reach the main URL, but notice the 2.0% that are landing on the /default.asp page. Although this page looks the same to the visitor the site’s main page SEO weight suffers.
Simple Fix!
To fix this, navigate to your Volusion SEO settings in your Volusion dashboard: Home > Marketing : SEO
To enable Canonical Link for the home page URLs just check the box highlighted above.
Always make sure “Enable SEO friendly URLs” is checked and verify “Enable Canonical Links” is also checked. Don’t forget to click SAVE at the bottom for the changes to take hold.
Following these simple steps can impact your Volusion SEO results and is well worth the 45 seconds it takes!
Comments and sharing are very welcome!
What are your ideas on Volusion SEO best practices?
What about all of the other pages?
I suppose that volusion thinks that duplicate content issues only really matter on the homepage and not on any other page on the entire site. I wonder if Google agrees.
Thanks for the comment Matthew. Volusion specifically points out the homepage URL issue, but they also have an option under SEO to “enable canonical links” which helps direct any long URLs, generated from special sorting or refined searches, to a more friendly URL such as the product page or category page.
Volusion’s words: “Checking the Enable Canonical Links box enables the canonical link metatag for each page, inserting the following link into each page’s HEAD:
link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.domain.com/xxxx_s/yyyy.htm”.”
Good question. I often wonder too if Google agrees!
Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp)
Brad – are you saying we should put a check mark in this box AND the Enable Canonical Links box?
Thanks!
Yes Greg, that is correct!
Do we then need to create 301 redirects or is that automatically done when following the steps above?
Thanks!
I don’t believe it creates a 301 redirect. I’ve tried to manually enter a 301 redirect from /default.asp to / but this doesn’t work like I had hoped. (Hoping to never see /default.asp in the URL)
You can use 301 Redirects if you rename a page or a product code changes, etc, etc. That way any links and traffic to the old page go directly to the new page!
Hi Brad,
Upon checking that highlighted box, this code is added to the source: link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/default.asp”
This would indicate that the preferred page is the default.asp page – NOT simply http://www.mysite.com.
If this is true, wouldn’t it be better to untick this box?
Thanks,
Brad (also)
Hey Brad (also),
Volusion does indeed add the line of code:
to the
of your site.As I understand this, it basically indicates to Google (and other search engines) that any link on that page should be recognized as http://www.yoursite.com/.
Volusion will always show the /default.asp page when anyone accesses your site without typing the “www” portion or clicking a link (Home in header) that is appended with /default.asp.
Thanks for the comment and hope this helps!
Ok can someone please clarify again what is the best way to have this setting? I am reading alot of contradicting posts about this issue.