On-Page Report Card, rel canonical
-
My site has the rel canonical tags set up for it. The developers say that it is set up correctly. Looking at the source code myself, it looks (to my untutored eyes) to be set up correctly. However, on the On Page Report Card for every page I have checked, it says that it doesn't point to the right page. I'd really like to change all my 'B's to 'A's, but I simply can't see what the issue is.
-
Thanks Ryan. So apparently it is OK to have relative links, as long as they are done correctly. My developers insist that they HAVE done them correctly, but SEOmoz flags it anyway because for all it knows, the base link may not have been set to the right location. I'm going to see if I can get the URLs changed to absolute.
-
It's in the code so your developer would have to do it, from Google's Guide:
Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
-
Hey James,
Not sure exactly how your site is organized but it seems like you should be able to resolve the issue using 301 direction instead of rel canonicals.
Sameer
-
1. I'm not sure how I would do that, so I would have to get the developers to do it.
2. I'm not sure if that would fix the issue
3. While it would be nice to have 'A's showing for the report cards, it isn't really essential if there isn't really a problem - and if this IS what is causing us to get dinged I'm not sure that it is truly a problem on my site, or just a limitation in the 'report card'.
-
Trying making the absolute URL, i.e. "http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons" as your href instead of "/category/9-Irons" in the rel="canonical" link tag.
-
Let's say that I sell golfing supplies and have the category "9-Irons". On that category page, the source code would say:
<link rel="canonical" href="[/category/9-Irons](view-source:http://www.breakoutbras.com/category/Nursing-Bras)" /> If I enter the keyword "9 Irons" into SEOmoz, and put the URL as: http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons I get dinged for having the wrong canonical reference.
-
Hi James. Lets say you have 15 pages that are the canonical pages and the 35 pages that are variations (alphabetically sorted, price sorted, whatnot). If those non-canonical 35 pages are being graded they're not going to have a rel=canonical that lines up because they're not the canonical page. The on page report card is only looking to match the URL you entered into the SEOmoz system and the tag that you have on your page. Is that what's happening in your situation?
I doubt it, but just in case you missed it, the explanation from On Page Report Card: If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.
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
-
Many Pages Being Combined Into One Long Page
Hi All, In talking with my internal developers, UX, and design team there has been a big push to move from a "tabbed" page structure (where as each tab is it's own page) to combining everything into one long page. It looks great from a user experience standpoint, but I'm concerned that we'll decrease in rankings for the tabbed pages that will be going away, even with a 301 in place. I initially recommending#! or pushstate for each "page section" on the long form content. However there are technical limitations with this in our CMS. The next idea I had was to still leave those pages out there and to link to them in the source code, but this approach may get shot down as well. Has anyone else had to solve for this issue? If so, how did you do it?
Technical SEO | | AllyBank1 -
Rel Canonical Crawl Notices
Hello, Within the Moz report from the crawl of my site, it shows that I had 89 Rel Canonical notices. I noticed that all the pages on my site have a rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on. Specific example from my site is as follows: http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment has a Rel Canonical tag <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment" />. Is this self reference harmless and if so why does it create a notice in the crawl? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Pages not being indexed
Hi Moz community! We have a client for whom some of their pages are not ranking at all, although they do seem to be indexed by Google. They are in the real estate sector and this is an example of one: http://www.myhome.ie/residential/brochure/102-iveagh-gardens-crumlin-dublin-12/2289087 In the example above if you search for "102 iveagh gardens crumlin" on Google then they do not rank for that exact URL above - it's a similar one. And this page has been live for quite some time. Anyone got any thoughts on what might be at play here? Kind regards. Gavin
Technical SEO | | IrishTimes0 -
My homepage+key pages have dropped 40+ positions after implementing redirects and canonical changes. HELP!
Hi SEOMozers, I work for a web based nonprofit at www.tisbest.org. I had a professional contact recommend that we work on our redirects to our homepage because we were losing valuable rank benefit. This combined with getting sick of seeing our weekly SEOMoz crawl reports show 304 duplicate page and title errors for months. No one could seem to figure out what was happening (we think it had to do with session stuff; we were seeing several versions of each page showing the following: www.tisbest.org/default.aspx/(random character string) My developer and I read a bunch of articles and started making changes 10 days ago: He setup 301 redirects from http://tisbest.org to http://www.tisbest.org. (set the canonical domain). We did a redirect from http://www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to root with "/". I set the canonical setting to www.tisbest.org in our webmaster tools. In our web config (we're running in asp.net), we changed our session detection from auto-detect then saw some session funkiness so we changed it back. Though we do think the character strings we were seeing were session GUID. He forced lower case URL’s to reduce duplicate page content/titles. I got my weekly crawl report 9 days ago and we had dropped from 340 duplicate page title and page content errors went to one. We went nuts and felt like the kings of SEO. Then, yesterday (9/28), the SEO grim reaper came knocking when I received my weekly SEOMoz ranking report. It said we had dropped 40+ spots for all of 9 of our keywords. Sure enough, I searched our keywords and our website was gone. Then I searched our company name, tisbest, and only a few of our pages show but not the homepage. I searched for our URL www.tisbest.org, and I originally got the expanded view (with 8 links to various webpages - can't remember what this view is called) but now, today (Saturday), the expanded view is gone from this search result. Also, when I run the On Page Report card for our homepage, I get the following error message with no results: "We were unable to grade that page. The page did not load. Curl::Err::TooManyRedirectsError: Number of redirects hit maximum amount." When I run the Open Site explorer report, I get this message at the top: Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.tisbest.org/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?" If I go to the report for the that report's page, it says that "No information is available for that URL." Just tonight (night of 9/29), our developer added the rel="canonical" href="http://www.tisbest.org" /> to our homepage tonight to see if that would help. We did not do that originally. In our Google Webmaster tools, I am seeing the number of URL Error - Not Followed has sky rocked. I have attached a screen capture to this thread. There are also a large number of URL Errors - Not Found errors as well. I did some research tonight and downloaded and ran Screaming Frog SEO Crawler. I have attached a screen capture below with this report and a couple of questions I sent our developer that may be helpful to you. Also, not sure if this is relevant, we use a master page that all of our pages inherit from so all of our pages get the same meta-data: name="keywords" content="charitable gift card, charitable gift certificate, non profit gift card, charity donation, giftcard, charity gift card, donation gift card, donation gift, charity gift, animal gift card, animal gift, environmental gift card, environmental gift, humanitarian gift card, humanitarian gift, christian gift card, christian gift, catholic gift card, catholic gift, religious gift card, religious gift" />id="ctl00_metaDescription" name="description" content="Award winning Charity Gift Card, for over 250 premier charities. A customized donation gift that makes the world better. TisBest is BBB Accredited." />name="google-site-verification" content="EfJIhN3h2SVSXdSpUbfceBVw2q6zrGX8rRQhdNZ1xY8" /><title></span><span> </span></p> <p>Can anyone help me/us identify the issue that obliterated our rankings? I am happy to give an information needed. Thank you! Chad Edwards</p> <a download="Bqcu1.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/Bqcu1.png" target="_blank">Bqcu1.png</a> <a download="ZXQ8d.png" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://i.imgur.com/ZXQ8d.png" target="_blank">ZXQ8d.png</a></title>
Technical SEO | | TisBest0 -
Have a client that migrated their site; went live with noindex/nofollow and for last two SEOMoz crawls only getting one page crawled. In contrast, G.A. is crawling all pages. Just wait?
Client site is 15 + pages. New site had noindex/nofollow removed prior to last two crawls.
Technical SEO | | alankoen1230 -
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
Hi! I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains. 1 product info page 2 same product but GREEN
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW **Question: ** Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1. Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language? Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ? /Lars0 -
301 lots of old pages to home page
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao1 -
Did I implement the Canonical Correctly?
Hello, I am trying for the first time to implement a canonical redirect on a page and would really appreciate it if someone could tell me if this was done correctly. I am trying to do a canonical redirect: -from http://www.diamondtours.com/default.aspx -to http://www.diamondtours.com/ As you will see in the source code of the default.aspx page, the line of code written is: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.diamondtours.com" /> Is this correct? Any guidance is greatly appreciated. Jeffrey Ferraro
Technical SEO | | JeffFerraro0