Rel canonical confusion
-
I have 172 pages on my site coming up as having a rel canoncial tag
This is not something I've added myself so I think it must either be part of wordpress or part of a plug in I'm using . ALL in One SEO?
They have come up as blue warning so not sure if it's a big deal, or what i need to do to fix it.
Thanks
Kate
-
Having rel=canonical is recommended for all pages of your website, even if it's the original version. It's because for example if your url is:
and you have that set as canonical on the page, and someone references to your page as
http://domain.com/url?ref=feed
The canonical URL will still be http://domain.com/url and hence won't count as duplicate pages.
-
Hi Neil
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. And for checking that everything is working fine re rel canonical thingies on my site.
I really appreciate it - award yourself 20 good deed points for today.
Best wishes,
Kate -
Hi Kate - this is nothing to worry about.
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 it appears the Wordpress SEO plugin you're using is doing fine.
Your canonical URLs are showing as what you most likely would expect and want them to be, the post permalinks or the category URLs.
I experimented and changed some of the letters in the URLs to uppercase, to check for problems. Whilst the URLs still resolved with uppercase characters and didn't 301 redirect to lowercase (which would generally considered best practice), the Rel canonical URLs set remained the lowercase version even with mixed case in the browser bar - this is, again, exactly how you would want it to behave.
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 error from Google
Moz couldn't explain this properly and I don't understand how to fix it. Google emailed this morning saying "Alternate page with proper canonical tag." Moz also kinda complains about the main URL and the main URL/index.html being duplicate. Of course they are. The main URL doesn't work without the index.html page. What am I missing? How can I fix this to eliminate this duplicate problem which to me isn't a problem?
Technical SEO | | RVForce0 -
GWT Duplicate Content and Canonical Tag - Annoying
Hello everyone! I run an e-commerce site and I had some problems with duplicate meta descriptions for product pages. I implemented the rel=canonical in order to address this problem, but after more than a week the number of errors showing in google webmaster tools hasn't changed and the site has been crawled already three times since I put the rel canonical. I didn't change any description as each error regards a set of pages that are identical, same products, same descriptions just different length/colour. I am pretty sure the rel=canonical has been implemented correctly so I can't understand why I still have these errors coming up. Any suggestions? Cheers
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Link rel next previous VS duplicate page title
Hello, I am running into a little problem that i would like to have a feedback on. I am running multiple wordpress blogs and Seo Moz pro is telling me that i have duplicate title tags on canadiansavers.ca vs http://www.canadiansavers.ca/page/2 I can dynamically add a page 2 to the title but I am correctly using the link rel: next and rel:previous Why is it seen as a duplicate title tag and should i add the page 2, page 3... in the meta title thanks
Technical SEO | | pixweb0 -
Rel = prev next AND canonical?
I have product category pages that correctly have the prev next but the moz crawl is giving me duplicate content errors. I would not think I also need to have canonical - but do I ?
Technical SEO | | JohnBerger0 -
Robots.txt and canonical tag
In the SEOmoz post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts, it's being said - If you have a robots.txt disallow in place for a page, the canonical tag will never be seen. Does it so happen that if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, spiders DO NOT read the html code ?
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
Canonical for stupid _GET parameters or not? [deep technical details]
Hi, Im currently working on www.kupwakacje.pl which is something like travel agency. People can search for holidays and buy/reserve them. I do know plenty of problems on my website, and thx to seomoz hopefully I will be able to fix them but one is crucial and it's kind of hard to fix I think. The search engine is provided by external party in form of simple API which is in the end responding with formatted HTML - which is completly stupid and pointless, but that's not the main problem. Let's dive in: So for example the visitor goes to homepage, selects Egypt and hit search button. He will be redirected to www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt/?ep3[]=%3Fsp%3D3%26a%3D2%26kt%3D%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26drt%3D30%26drf%3D0%26px and this is not a joke 😉 'wczasy-egipt' is my invention obviously and it means 'holidays-egypt'. I've tried to at least have 'something' in the url that makes google think it's related to Egypt indeed. Rest which is the complicated ep3[] thingy is a bunch of encoded parameters. This thing renders in first step a list of hotels, in next one hotel specific offer and in next one the reservation page. Problem is that all those links generated by this so-called API are only changing subparameters in ep3[] parameter so for example clicking on a single hotel changes to url to: www.kupwakacje.p/wczasy-egipt/?url=wczasy-egipt/&ep3[]=%3Fsid%3Db5onrj4hdnspb5eku4s2iqm1g3lomq91%26l ang%3Dpl%26drt%3D30%26sd%3D10.06.2011%26ed%3D30.12.1999%26px%3D99999 %26dsr%3D11%253A%26ds%3D11%253A%26sp%3D which is obviously looking not very different to the first one. what I would like to know is shall i make all pages starting with 'wczasy-egipt' a rel-canonical to the first one (www.kupwakacje.pl/wczasy-egipt) or shoudn't I? google recognizes the webpage according to webmasters central, and recognizes the url but responses with mass duplicate content. What about positioning my website for the hotel names - so long tail optimalization? I know it's a long and complicated post, thx for reading and I would be very happy with any tip or response.
Technical SEO | | macic0 -
Rel-canonical tag
Hi, I'm having some confusion with the rel-canonical tag. A few months ago we implemented the rel-canonical tag because we had many errors specifically duplicate page content come upon the SEOmoz web app (mostly because we use tracking code). I had asked what to do about this and was advised by the SEOmoz web app to implement the rel-canonical tag. However, when I'm working on the Keyword Optimizer Tool, it always checks off that I'm using the rel-canonical tag improperly, and then when I go into our sites' CMS for that page and uncheck "Use Canonical URL", the keyword optimizer tool up's my grade for that correction/that I've made an improvement. So my question is if the page I'm working on is the one I want search engines to find, should I not be using the Canonical URL tag? Should the Canonical URL tag only be used on URL's with the tracking code?
Technical SEO | | aircyclemegan0