Rel Canonical problem or SEOmoz bug ?
-
Hello all,
I hope that sombody out there could help me with my question.
I am very new in SEO and in SEOmoz community. I am not familiar with coding. I am goining to start learning soon enough but till now I now only basics.
At the website where I am trying to optimize for SEO I am reciving this Crawl Diagnostic Programme.
Issue: Rel Canonical (Notice) not Error
I searched and lerned what it is. So I contact the developers of the website. Build in wordpress and ask them how to corrected ? They told me that they are using Canonical Tags to all their pages and have no idea why SEOmoz keep identifining it as a "notice"
They also tel me to check the source code of page to see the canonical tag. I did and their is actuall a canonical tag there.
Cjeck please here www.costanavarinogolf.com
So do you have any idea why this is happening ? could you help me explaiin to developers what they should do to overcome this ?
Or it's just a bug of SEOmoz and not a reall problem exist ?
Thank you very much for your time
-
I'd honestly leave it alone. I've never seen a preventive canonical (even if unnecessary) cause problems. As you expand the site, it could help prevent future problems, implemented correctly.
In terms of SEOmoz, I wouldn't worry about the notice - it's just a notice, which we put even below a warning. We're evaluating how to assess canonical for future versions of the software, because it is confusing to people.
-
Thank you both really for helping me out.
SEOmoz crawls 20 pages and all the pages have a canonical notice. I know that is not something big and maybe not important. But I really want to know why is happening as will help me to undrstand canonical issues better. I did a lot of research alone to realize what is canonicalization and trust meis very dificult if you have no idea about codeing.
So you suggest to tell the delelopers only to use cnonical on home page. and then wait to see if this solve the issue ?
Thank you very much both for your help
-
I'm not seeing any issues. Your canonical tags seem correct. The "Notice" level is the least severe, and we may just be seeing a mismatched URL or two (we're crawling the non-canonical, in other words). In many cases, that's fine. I see no signs of duplicate content in the Google index itself.
We sometimes to recommend preventive canonical tags, especially on dynamic sites, but they're not necessary on all page. I do highly recommend using it on the home-page, as home pages can easily collect variants ("www" vs non-www, secure/https, tracking parameters, etc.).
I think our system is being hyperactive on this one, though. I see no reason to worry.
-
Technically Yes,
As your site is currently being used canonical seems redundant, The site is Wordpress, so the ability to redirect must be available (I am assuming of course)
So I am not sure I see a reason for a site wide implementation of Canonical, although there are so many other reasons, that really without having more knowledge about your particular situation, I cannot for sure say they are right or wrong.
I would only suggest that you ask them why Canonical is implemented, and if it even needs to be there since duplicate content does not seem to be a factor.
If you do not like their answer then I would bring it back to this forum. (not necessarily this thread as it may not get answered if alot of time has passed)
Shane
-
So you think it is better to ask them remove the canonical tag ?
-
I really did not spend to long looking at your site, but was not sure I understood why canonical was used at all?
I see that this site, is not really being utilized as a traditional "Blog" so you would not actually have the duplicated content issues that come along with Blog Posts having their own page, plus being on the homepage.
I am not sure I can give you a suggestion to give to the developers except, why is canonical being used when it appears it does not need to be used?
If you do have multiple pages of duplicate content then this would be a reason, but I did not see them.
The notices you are getting from SEOMOZ are just that... Notices that the Canonical is in place i believe.
So i guess in summary the actual question I would have is do you really need the Canonical Tag at all? I am not sure it is hurting you, but not sure you need it either.
There are also some META tags that really have no use.. example INDEX, FOLLOW the default without a counter NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW or robots.txt is always INDEX FOLLOW.
Hope this helps
w00t!
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 in an eCommerce site
We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..
Technical SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Need help with rel canonical!
I have a client who's MOZ crawl is coming back with 62 "notices" about rel canonical. Is this bad? On the report, it lists the url, then "Tag Value" as the home page.....what does this mean exactly? Are they pointing all the pages to the home page? I think I have 301 and rel can confused....
Technical SEO | | cschwartzel0 -
Should I use canonical?
I'm working on a site that sells audio tracks, the site is a Wordpress build. I've got Yoast and XML Sitemaps running for SEO. The site has been developed (not by myself) to use a flash based audio player. Now this player offers the ability to share, sell products etc... The player has been placed on the homepage and the main music catalog page. The main catalog page has had a custom page type created for itself. This page has been created in such a way that if you visit the actual page from dashboard > Pages and add content then no content will appear on the page. Even the page header is pulled from the PHP. So really as far as I am aware no real content is being seen on the page by a search engine. Except the content on the side bars (it has 2 sidebars on either side of the page.) The homepage has an introductory paragraph and header which are editable via the normal method in Wordpress. A custom post type has been created specifically for music items. When a music item is uploaded it is added to the music item feed on the homepage and music catalog pages. It also creates a separate post for the item itself. These items at the moment also have 'no content' as they are only sidebars with a flash music player. I've started to add short paragraphs and headers to them so there is content on the music item posts. I cannot however, in the time frame/budget start entering deeply descriptive content about each item. (I considered adding the intro paragraph from the homepage and using a canonical tag to the homepage on every music item). So here is my question. What do I do with these music items? Do I use canonical and point them toward the music catalog or the homepage? If so which one? I want the homepage or music catalog page to rank well and I am concerned that search engines aren't going to see these most vital parts of the site. I don't think individual items ranking is helpful, so what do i do?!?! The home and catalog pages are the two main pages of the site. I am going to advise a new player, page type etc... be utilised but at the moment I need a solution quickly. Any help will be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | benyamin0 -
Beginner - needs to better understand rel=canonical. What is the best resource?
I'm pretty sure I have pages/posts that are competing on the same keyword and would like to fix it. What is the best beginners guide to understanding rel=canonical and how to use it to improve our SEO?
Technical SEO | | JonnyBird10 -
Do I have a canonical problem?
Does this site www.davidclick.com have a canonical problem because the home page can be requested via 3 different urls http://www.davidclick.com/
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://davidclick.com/
http://www.davidclick.com/index.htm but I'm confused in terms of applying a fix for example all advice here http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066#1 says i need to identify the duplicate files and add So my question is please if I do have a canonical problem how can i fix it when I only have one file for my home page, there are no duplicates 😞 Any insights welcome 🙂0 -
Getting rid of duplicate content with rel=canonical
This may sound like a stupid question, however it's important that I get this 100% straight. A new client has nearly 6k duplicate page titles / descriptions. To cut a long story short, this is mostly the same page (or rather a set of pages), however every time Google visits these pages they get a different URL. Hence the astronomical number of duplicate page titles and descriptions. Now the easiest way to fix this looks like canonical linking. However, I want to be absolutely 100% sure that Google will then recognise that there is no duplicate content on the site. Ideally I'd like to 301 but the developers say this isn't possible, so I'm really hoping the canonical will do the job. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Rel=Canonical to Rewrite or original URL?
Working with a large number of duplicate pages due to different views of products. Rewriting URLs for the most linked page. Should rel=canonical point to the rewritten URL or the actual URL? Is there a way to see what the rewritten URL is within the crawl data? I was taking the approach of rewriting only the base version of each page and then using a rel=canonical on the duplicate pages. Can anyone recommend a better or cleaner approach? Haven't seen too many articles on retail SEO when faced with a less than optimized CMS. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | AmsiveDigital0
