Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
-
I have encountered problems regarding rel canonical. When I ran On-Page Report Card it says
**Error: **
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Canonical URL: "http://www.sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/"
Explanation: 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. Recommendation We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL.
NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply."
I just don't know how to fix this. I am using Wordpress SEO by Yoast but I haven't change any settings regarding rel canonical. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks
-
Hi Anthony,
Just checking in! Are you still having issues or were you able to resolve this? More than happy to help if you still need it.
Cyrus
-
The issue here might be because of how your site is seen by Google. After visiting the site, you can see that the www. part of the URL is removed across the site, so you're only left with sourcedental.create etc etc.
That's fine, but the example you gave above said that the canonical URL, what is defined as the original URL and the one that Google should rank, contains a www. This is inconsistent with that is happening with your site. Your canonical should match the site and not include the www.
Having said that, this shouldn't cause a major issue because, even if Google tried to index the www. version as per the canonical's directive, it 301 redirects to the non www. version anyway.
What's also confusing is that, having looked at your source code, your canonical URL is denominated as http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/, so it's actually set up properly.
If your canonical URL is set up to be http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/ in the Yoast plugin, then I'd say the problem lies more with the SEOMoz tool rather than your site. In which case, just ignore it as everything seems to be working as intended, from what I can see.
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
-
Duplicate ecommerce domains and canonical
Hi everybody! I'd like to discuss the SEO strategy I've thought regarding a client of mine and ask for help because it's a serious case of duplicate content. There is a main website (the business model one) where he compares the cost of medicines in several pharmacies, to show the cheapest shopping cart to the customer. But the shopping has to been made in another domain, within the selected pharmacie, because my country's law in Europe says that is compulsory to sell the medicines only on the pharmacy website. So my client has started to create domains, one for each pharmacy, where the differences between them are only some products, the business information of the pharmacy and the template's colour. But all of them shares the same product data base. My aim is to rank the comparing website (it contains all the products), not each pharmacy, so I've started to create different content for this one. Should I place rel=canonical in the pharmacies domains t the original one? For instance: www.pharmacie1.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie2.com >> www.originaltorank.com www.pharmacie1.com/product-10 >> www.originaltorank.com/product-10 I've already discuss the possibilities to focus all the content in only one website, but it's compulsory to have different domains in order to sell medicines By the way, I can't redirect 301 because I need these websites exist for the same reason (the law) He is creating 1-3 new domains every week so obviously he has had a drop in his SEO traffic that I have to solve this fast. Do you think the canonical will be the best solution? I dont want to noindex these domains beacuse we're creating Google Local pages for each one in order to be found in their villages. Please, I'll appreciate any piece of advice. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Estherpuntu0 -
Rel=canonical vs noindex/follow - tabs with individual URLs
Hi everyone I've got a situation that I haven't seen in quite this way before. I would like some advice on whether I should be rel=canonicalzing of noindexing/following a range of pages on a clients website. I've just started working on a website that creates individual URLs for tabs within each page which has resulted in several URLs being created for each listing: Example URLs: hotel-downtown-calgary hotel-downtown-calgary/gallery?tab hotel-downtown-calgary?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/map?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/facilities?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab hotel-downtown-calgary/in-the-area?tab Google has indexed over 1500 pages with the "?tab" parameter (there are 4380 page indexed for the site in total), and also seems to be indexing some of these pages without the "?tab" parameter i.e. ("hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews" instead of "hotel-downtown-calgary/reviews?tab") so the amount of potential duplication could be more. These tabbed pages are getting minimal traffic from organic search, so I've got no issues with taking them out of the index - the question is how. There are the issues I see: Each tab has the same title as the other tabs for each location, so lots of title duplication. Each individual tab doesn't have much content (although the content each tab has is unique). I would usually expect the tabs to be distinguished by the parameters only, not have unique URLs - if that was the case we wouldn't have a duplication issue. So the question is: rel=canonical or noindex/follow? I can see benefits of both. Looking forward to your thoughts!
On-Page Optimization | | Digitator0 -
Can I use nofollow to limit the number of links on a page?
My website is an ecommerce and we have on homepage about 470 links ! 1. We have a top bar with my account, login, faq, home, contact us and link to a content page. 2 . Then we have multistore selection 3. Then we have the departament menu, with several parants + child category links 4. Then we have a banner 5. Then we have a list of the recently sold and new products. 6. then we have an image grid with the most important cms/content pages (like faq, about us, etc) 7. then we have footer, with all info pages, contact us, about us, my account etc. There are some links that are repeted 2, 3 times. For a user it is easier to find the informations but I'm not sure how search bots (google) deal with that. So I was thinking on how can I have around 150 links to be followed. To remove the links from the page is not possible. What about to add nofollow to repeted links and some child category, as the spider will crawl the father and will access child on the next page? Is this a good strategy?
On-Page Optimization | | qgairsoft0 -
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO?
Is Disqus comments useful as per SEO? We have some comments on each of our pages and its time taking to moderate them, so wanted to know if its beneficial in any ways for SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | bsharath0 -
Use External Links
Hey 🙂 I noticed when analysing my pages that Moz gives the following advice about adding external links to my articles; "On any page specifically targeting a keyword, link externally to at least one (and possibly more than one) relevant, trusted resources as a best practice." As a small business I work pretty damn hard to get visitors to my website, so why on earth would I want to go to all that trouble just to send them away again to a trusted resouce? Secondly, what exactly is a "trusted resource"? Can I simply use search and use the top competitor, for example Moz or Wikipedia and does the anchor need to be an exact match or will a partial suffice. I say this because I already have the top spot for my longtail, so an exact match would be pointless. And lastly, I notice that pretty much all quality sites use external links to open in the same window i.e. not target=_blank, I never thought of it before today, but now that I'm considering using external linking in my articles I guess it's important to know the answer - i.e. Is this a best practice and does this give any seo benefit? Cheers, Lee :)
On-Page Optimization | | LeeC0 -
Rel Canonical help
Is it possible to confirm this to me please? My understanding of the rel canonical tag was to tell google of duplicate content? so for instance product 1
On-Page Optimization | | TeamacPaints
www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/category/subcategory/theproduct1 Product 1a
www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/category/subcategory/theproduct1a same content just a different colour would be rel canonical'd to Product 1 as thats the main product, is my understanding correct? Now here is what I have discovered. www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/category/subcategory/theproduct1 has a rel canonical tag that reverts back to www.ourdomain.co.uk/products/ which isn't optimized as such its just a generic catalog page. This is inccorect and google will dismiss the actial product and revert to the generic catalog page? any help would be great.0 -
Meta tag "revisit after" - useful?
Hi everybody, I've rarely seen the "revisit after" meta tag during the last 1,5 years. As some of my current client websites are still using it and I'm not sure, if it's still usefull/has any effect, I'd like to hear from the community. Any advices/hints/experiences with the tag? Thanks in advance and cheers from Germany Sven
On-Page Optimization | | targi420 -
Keyword use in Title tag?
To improve SEO on a particular keyword, should you use that same keyword in the title tag of multiple pages within your site? Will that help or would it actually hurt by causing pages within your site to complete against each other for that keyword? Does it make a difference if that keyword is truly used on all those different pages?
On-Page Optimization | | KHCreative0