Canonical Confusion
-
Hey guys,
I'm having a hard time grasping canonical links and the warnings I'm getting on my report card.
I'm using Yoast SEO Plug-In and can see that every page on my site has a canonical reference to the URL of the page I'm at.
Can someone please enlighten me on this subject. I'm reading everything I can about Canonicalization (honestly...an easier word please) but I does not make sense yet.
Thanks!
I added the notice I'm getting on my report card.
This is my domain http://bbguard.com.ve
-
Great! Thanks for the reply.
I'll get to it today.
F.
-
Yes I would say so. Choose one and go with it.
You can set your .htaccess file to redirect non www to www. If you can access a page with and without www then google will index both and issue you with a duplicate content warning.
-
From what I've been reading, search engines do consider those two to be the same URL (or at least do a good job at figuring that out).
Apparently they might be interpreted as different URLs. This adds to the confusion
From reading 3 articles and watching one video I have changed my understanding of this 4 times.
Can someone expand on this a bit further?
-
Ok, I see where I made a mistake:
I did the report card using http://www.bbguard.com.ve/ and it gave an error because the canonical is set up to be http://bbguard.com.ve
I just did the report card using http://bbguard.com.ve/ and it passed.
Is the www vs non www something I need to resolve?
-
Fabian
I need the url of the page this came from. When I looked at the site, every page I looked at had the canonical correct, but the first time I used mozbar on home page it did not show. When I inspected it, you had it in correctly. I went through 4 other pages and all show canonical is correct.
I then ran on page report card and, again all is well. If you ran it in a campaign, just give me the url of the page that is not correct.What it is saying usually means someone did something like inadvertently used the home page url for the canon on another, etc.
Best
Edit: here is On Page Report Card result for http://bbguard.com.ve/ attached as image.
There is no prob with the home page.
-
Only difference is see is that the page:
http://bbguard.com.veHas a rel value:
http://bbguard.com.ve/In the eyes of a search engine I am not sure that these URLs are identical. I would make them match exactly.
Are you only having this problem for the home page or are you getting warnings for other pages?
Best regards,
Rasmus
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
-
Canonical URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
Duplicate Page Content, Indexing and Rel Canonical Just DOUBLED! Need Advice to Fix
Last Friday (Penguin 5/2.1) my website shot way off the grid and I noticed in my MOZ PRO Campaign dashboard that all of the following just doubled in numbers on my website: duplicate page content, Google indexing, and rel canonicals. I also noticed that some of my pages, images, tags and categories now added a /page/2/ or a -2. I just changed noindex for tags, but indexing for media, pages, posts, and categories. I'm currently using All In One SEO for a plugin. Any advice would be much appreciated as I'm stuck on the issue. relconical.png Duplicate-Page-Content.png [Duplicate Content II](Duplicate Content II) index1.png
Moz Pro | | CelebrityPersonalTrainer0 -
Why do I see a duplicate content errors when rel="canonical" tag is present
I was reviewing my first Moz crawler report and noticed the crawler returned a bunch of duplicate page content errors. The recommendations to correct this issue are to either put a 301 redirect on the duplicate URL or use the rel="canonical" tag so Google knows which URL I view as the most important and the one that should appear in the search results. However, after poking around the source code I noticed all of the pages that are returning duplicate content in the eyes of the Moz crawler already have the rel="canonical" tag. Does the Moz crawler simply not catch whether that tag is being used? If I have that tag in place, is there anything else I need to do in order to get that error to stop showing up in the Moz crawler report?
Moz Pro | | shinolamoz0 -
Confused about canonicalization
Hello Guys, I have just started to use SEOMOZ and I am trying as much as possible to follow the advise from the initial scan and suggestions I received from SEOMOZ. However, it appears that the first changes I made has somehow made my website to disappear on Google and other search engines. Canonicalization The first changes I made was "Canonicalization" of my domain name (redirecting to a single dominant version) from the instructions here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization. So I redirected and changed my domain name from "domainname.com" to "www.domainname.com" I did check my listing in Google before these updates and Google have my website down as "www.domainname.com" My keywords that were previously performing well before these recent updates have now disappeared which is causing me some great level of frustration and I am really not sure weather to continue with the instructions from SEOMOZ or not. However, it could be that I am being impatient or checking too soon. I'd appreciate some form of advise on what to do? Many thanks.
Moz Pro | | abbeylinks20020 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Canonical Question
On one of my sites I have 61 notices for Rel Canonical. Is it bad to have these or is this just something that's informative?
Moz Pro | | kadesmith0 -
Canonical for Mobile
Hi Guys, I am curious why in SEOMoz, our mobile site is showing to have the canonical tags used on the desktop site but when you double check the code of the mobile website it is showing m.domain.com Any thoughts on why we are seeing this? Also is there any lag in the code updates being reported through the SEOmoz toolset? Thanks for all your help! Cheers,
Moz Pro | | lwalker0 -
Canonical issue in open site explorer
When I look at my back links in OSE, I see two landing pages on my site that are really the same page. www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/(affiliate code here) These show different inbound link characteristics and page authority. The page in question has a rel=canonical tag. Am I doing something wrong?
Moz Pro | | EugeneF0 -
Tool for scanning the content of the canonical tag
Hey All, question for you. What is your favorite tool/method for scanning a website for specific tags? Specifically (as my situation dictates now) for canonical tags? I am looking for a tool that is flexible, hopefully free, and highly customizable (for instance, you can specify the tag to look for). I like the concept of using google docs with the import xml feature but as you can only use 50 of those commands at a time it is very limiting (http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/). I do have a campaign set up using the tools which is great! but I need something that returns a response faster and can get data from more than 10,000 links. Our cms unfortunately puts out some odd canonical tags depending on how a page is rendered and I am trying to catch them quickly before it gets indexed and causes problems. Eventually I would also like to be able to scan for other specific tags, hence the customizable concern. If we have to write a vb script to get it into excel I suppose we can do that. Cheers, Josh
Moz Pro | | prima-2535090