Rel=canonical
-
Hi, there is something puzzling us about the rel=canonical reports...
On the general report that is generated after the system crawls our site, we have blue flags on the rel=canonical tag, but the flags don't actually specify exactly what is wrong, they just say: "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical." so we presumed that we should take the rel=canonical tag out of our pages, and after we did so, we noticed that the on-page-report-card (the one that shows up when you run the keyword page optimization tool from the research tools) says (close to the bottom of the report) that we should have 1 canonical tag on each page.
So right now we're confused, the general website crawl report flags the rel canonical as being bad and then the on page report flags not having them, we don't really know what to do, should we keep the rel=canonical or not? We are using wordpress to power our site, wordpress has a built-in system for generating the rel canonical for each page, I've checked that and the tags are being generated properly, but we have no idea why the general website report flags them in blue, the error message is not too comprehensive.
Any help or information you could provide would be much appreciated. Our website is taxproblem.org thanks.
-
I'm not sure what the deal is with blue flags and report cards, but if you have duplicate pages, you should either use the 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. My guess is that maybe you had a rel=canonical tag on a page that pointed to the same page, so maybe the crawling tool took that to be some kind of error? I don't know, but make sure your duplicate pages are either redirected to the original or that they use a rel=canonical tag to specify the original, and don't worry about any reports that are simply notifying you of the purpose of a canonical tag.
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 tag on webstore products to avoid Duplicate Page Content ?
Hi, I would like to have an opinion on what how we are planning to solve the issue with Duplicate Page Contents that MOZ PRO is showing us. MOZ Pro is showing us a lot of pages with duplicate content as High Priority Issue. Mainly the problem is with products which have very few differences between them, e.g. pink bike model X and red bike model X. So we decided to implement a canonical tag on these products, and the pink bike model X will now have a canonical pointing to the red bike model X. So hopefully we will be ranking higher with our red bike model X and our pink bike model X will disapear from the index. Am I right ? Is it a good practice, since we will loose long tails indexes? I check each canonical in the Search Console, and we have extremely few searched for "pink bike model X" most of searches are "bike model X". Thank you in advance for your opinion. Isabelle
Moz Pro | | isabelledylag0 -
Do we need rel="prev" and rel="next" if we have a rel="canonical" for the first page of a series
Despite having a canonical on page 1 of a series of paginated pages for different topics, Google is indexing several, sometimes many pages in each topic. This is showing up as duplicate page title issues in Moz and Screaming Frog. Ideally Google would only index the first page in the series. Do we need to use rel="prev" etc rather than a canonical on page 1? How can we make sure Google crawls but doesn't index the rest of the series?
Moz Pro | | hjsand1 -
No more than one canonical url Tag.
I just got the "no more than one canonical url TAG" for this page http://www.vacuumadvisers.com/1/electrolux-ultra-active-deep-clean-bagless-canister-vacuum-cleaner-review. I have no idea how to Fix that. Tried google it but none for Tag in particular. PS. I have changed the Theme recently therefore so did the URL Anyone?
Moz Pro | | bishop230 -
Rel=canonical "redirects" to double links
Our devs have set up rel=canonical on our website. First they used relative links href="/dir1/dir2/dir3" for the page http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/?detail1=1?detail2=2 meaning that it will redirect to http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3, but no luck, the MOZ dashboard showed the tag value to be http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir1/dir2/dir3, then we have decided to rewrite the code, and now the canonical to http://wwwmysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/?detail1=1?detail2=2 looks like href="http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/" but the tag on MOZ looks like http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3. So what is the problem? I really got a problem or MOZ does? The code on website looks exactly like href="http://www.aaa.com/en/bbb/ccc/vvv/nnn/" rel="canonical" /> for the page http://www.aaa.com/en/bbb/ccc/vvv/nnn/
Moz Pro | | apartmentGin0 -
Is canonical link enough?
Hi SEOmozers! I have a question. SEOmoz analysis report me some duplicate that I thought I had fix. I can give a concrete example. This page: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/dec2011training-boston/moreinfo is reported as having 6 duplicated URL in the tool. When I click on 6, SEOMOZ tells me "Our crawl bots are getting their joints greased to fetch you even better data. Sorry for the delay!" And on the page itself, I placed a canonical link to follow recommandation. rel="canonical" href="http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/apr2012training-boston" /> As a result I am curious why I would have this reported as duplicate by SEOmoz. Is this a bug? Thanks for feedback!
Moz Pro | | nuxeo0 -
Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content. To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g. http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist. What can we do to remove these error messages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | TJSSEO1 -
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