- Dec 3, 2018
- 13
- 14
- First Name
- Christopher
For webmasters working within the DealerON CMS, noticed a curious SEO issue using their new Enterprise Specials Manager. Clicking through to the actual ads, the canonical link element is set at a URL that does not exist on your website. This is from a randomly selected DealerON site:
<link href="https://www.adamsonford.com/SpecialDetailsPage.aspx" rel="canonical">
The URL of the special itself is:
https://www.adamsonford.com/offerde...ma-Shop-Our-Used-Vehicle-Specials-Today-22232
And the used specials landing page:
https://www.adamsonford.com/usedspecials.html
Sampling five other DealerON websites shows the same. Perhaps these pages wouldn't generate many organic entrances to begin with, but I also have a client creating very specific specials for individual makes / models that could capture long-tail search queries. This current set up certainly isn't helping either way.
Another curious tidbit: perhaps the canonical link element URL for the specials page is a historical URL? Running the same sample of sites though the Wayback CDX Server API did not find /SpecialDetailsPage.aspx within any of the results, though.
Anyway, I personally hold zero clout with members of the DealerON development or SEO departments. Just funny they set it up this way - my recommendation would be for these individual specials URLs to self-canonicalize.
<link href="https://www.adamsonford.com/SpecialDetailsPage.aspx" rel="canonical">
The URL of the special itself is:
https://www.adamsonford.com/offerde...ma-Shop-Our-Used-Vehicle-Specials-Today-22232
And the used specials landing page:
https://www.adamsonford.com/usedspecials.html
Sampling five other DealerON websites shows the same. Perhaps these pages wouldn't generate many organic entrances to begin with, but I also have a client creating very specific specials for individual makes / models that could capture long-tail search queries. This current set up certainly isn't helping either way.
Another curious tidbit: perhaps the canonical link element URL for the specials page is a historical URL? Running the same sample of sites though the Wayback CDX Server API did not find /SpecialDetailsPage.aspx within any of the results, though.
Anyway, I personally hold zero clout with members of the DealerON development or SEO departments. Just funny they set it up this way - my recommendation would be for these individual specials URLs to self-canonicalize.
