Campaign Issue: Rel Canonical - Does this mean it should be "on" or "off?"
-
Hello, somewhat new to the finer details of SEO - I know what canonical tags are, but I am confused by how SEOmoz identifies the issue in campaigns.
I run a site on a wordpress foundation, and I have turned on the option for "canonical URLs" in the All in one SEO plugin. I did this because in all cases, our content is original and not duplicated from elsewhere.
SEOmoz has identified every one of my pages with this issue, but the explanation of the status simply states that canonical tags "indicate to search engines which URL should be seen as the original."
So, it seems to me that if I turn this OFF on my site, I turn off the notice from SEOmoz, but do not have canonical tags on my site.
Which way should I be doing this?
THANK YOU.
-
Thank you both for your answers. Much appreciated.
-
This is a notice, not an error or a warning. It's basically saying "hey, people can often screw this up, take a look and make sure that everything looks OK to you".
-
Rel Canonicals are generally shown on the SEOmoz PRO dashboard as an alert/heads up, rather than a direct warning. There is, of course, potential for real damage if they're configured incorrectly, but in your case the Wordpress SEO plugin you're using is probably doing just fine.
As long as your canonical URLs are what you want them to be, i.e. the relevant post permalinks or category URLs, you're golden.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
"Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
Hey there Mozzers, I have a question regarding Thin pages. Unfortunately, we have Thin pages, almost empty to be honest. I have the idea to ask the dev team to do "noindex, follow" on these pages. What do you think? Has someone faced this situation before? Will appreciate your input!
Technical SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Does rel="canonical" support protocol relative URL?
I need to switch a site from http to https. We gonna add 301 redirect all over the board. I also use rel="canonical" to strip some queries parameter from the index (parameter uses to identify which navigation elements were use.) rel="canonical" can be used with relative or absolute links, but Google recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. So here my question, did you see any issue using relative protocol in rel="canonical"? Instead of:
Technical SEO | | EquipeWeb0 -
"Fourth-level" subdomains. Any negative impact compared with regular "third-level" subdomains?
Hey moz New client has a site that uses: subdomains ("third-level" stuff like location.business.com) and; "fourth-level" subdomains (location.parent.business.com) Are these fourth-level addresses at risk of being treated differently than the other subdomains? Screaming Frog, for example, doesn't return these fourth-level addresses when doing a crawl for business.com except in the External tab. But maybe I'm just configuring the crawls incorrectly. These addresses rank, but I'm worried that we're losing some link juice along the way. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | jamesm5i0 -
Canonical redirects
Hello, I have a quick question: I use wordpress for my website. I have a plugin for translating the website in other languages. Thus, I have 2 versions of urls, one with /en, one without (original languale). This has been seen as duplicate content. I have been advised that the best to do is to use canonical redirect. Should I use it on the general header.php (the only header I can find in the CMS), or should I redirect each page singularly? I believe the second is the best way, but I can't find headers and txt documents for each page in my FTP. As well I have seen this post, in which is explained that canonical redirects can be done directly in the general header.php http://www.bin-co.com/blog/2009/02/avoid-duplicate-content-use-canonical-url-in-wordpress-fix-plugin/ Is it true? You have any suggestion?
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Thanks! 🙂 Eugenio0 -
Wordpress "incoming search terms" plugin
Hello everyone! newbie to SEO and have been trying to keep everything nice and ethical but I've seen on a couple of blogs today "incoming search terms" at the bottom of the blogs, then a bullet pointed list of search terms beneath it. So I had a quick search about the use of it and noticed wordpress has a plugin that automatic ally generates these "incoming search terms". I ask is this a legitimate plugin or will this harm my blog? I assume it generally will as I can't see this being much use for the audience, rather it would be 100% for trying to lure in search engines.
Technical SEO | | acecream0 -
Penality issues
Hi there, I'm working on site that has been badly hit by penguin. The reasons are clear, exact match blog network links and tons of spammy exact match links such as comment spam, low quality directories, the usual junk. The spammy links were mainly to 2 pages, they were targetting keyword 1 and keyword 2. I'd like to remove these two pages from google, as they dont even rank in google now and create one high quality page that targets both the keywords, as they are similar. The dilemma I have is these spammy pages still get traffic from bing and yahoo and it's profitable traffic. Is there a safe way to remove the pages from google and leave them for bing and yahoo? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
Rel=Canonical on a page with 302 redirection existing
Hi SEOMoz! Can I have the rel=canonical tag on a URL page that has a 302 redirection? Does this harm the search engine friendliness of a content page / website? Thanks! Steve
Technical SEO | | sjcbayona-412180 -
301 or Rel=canonical
Should I use a 301 redirect for redirect mywebsite.com to www.mywebsite.com or use a rel=canonical?? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | LeslieVS0