Does rel canonical need to be absolute?
-
Hi guys and gals,
Our CMS has just been updated to its latest version which finally adds support for rel=canonical. HUZZAH!!! However, it doesn't add the absolute URL of the page. There is a base ref tag which looks like <base <="" span="">href="http://shop.confetti.co.uk/" />
On a page such as http://shop.confetti.co.uk/branch/wedding-favours the canonical tag looks like rel="canonical" href="/branch/wedding-favours" />
Does Google recognise this as a legitimate canonical tag? The SEOmoz On-Page Report Card doesn't recognise it as such.
Any help would be great,
Thanks in advance,
Brendan.
-
Thanks Naghirniac,
Since I posted this I've looked further in to the CMS update and found that each and every page on our site (around 8,000) has a relative canonical link on it which points to itself. They also cannot be edited thus making them completely useless! Gotta love these CMS developers! URRRGGGGHHHHH!!!
Thanks anyway,
Brendan.
-
Hi Brendan,
You are luck: there is no need to be absolute, you can use the relative link.
You can confirm this at: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Best regards,
Naghirniac
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 URL Multidomain Geolocation Based
Hey there Mozzers, I have a question on the implementation of the canonical tag. I have 3 TLDs that redirect depending the GeoLocation of the person entering the site. www.example.com www.example.co.uk www.example.com.au The content is the same to all of those. Should I choose 1 of them that all the canonicals should point or should all them point to themselves with the canonical tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Need help for improving SEO App?
Please refer our guru99 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vector.guru99&hl=en We have tons of free materials related to SAP in the app. The problem we are facing is we do not rank for terms like SAP or SAP tutorial and discovery is an issue I have searched over the internet and found no concrete solution. Can you experts help ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chirag7530 -
Rel=canonical
I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag. Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page. Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense. Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arcade880 -
Should we use the rel-canonical tag?
We have a secure version of our site, as we often gather sensitive business information from our clients. Our https pages have been indexed as well as our http version. Could it still be a problem to have an http and an https version of our site indexed by Google? Is this seen as being a duplicate site? If so can this be resolved with a rel=canonical tag pointing to the http version? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | annieplaskett1 -
Merging blog post tags within static page - Rel = Canonical?
As a blogger, I use a combination of categories and tags in order to organize my content. I do index tags because they've been very powerful for SEO purposes, but there are certain keywords in which I'd like to be able to create an entirely separate static page with the tagged posts merged onto it. So in other words, this is what I'd like the landing page to be: www.website.com/keyword as opposed to www.website.com/tags/keyword Because of this, I'm uncertain what I need to do with that tag page. With this, I would assume that www.website.com/tags/keywords needs to be indexed, but what would be the wise thing to do? Do I place a rel=canonical on www.website.com/tags/keyword to the static page? Do I do a simple re-direct? Do I just leave it indexed? Will it dilute my desired landing page? Would appreciate all comments and thoughts. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | longview0 -
Should we Use rel=canonical in ccTLDs websites
We have multilingual eCommerce websites with some content variations but majority of the content remains the same We have used rel=alternate hreflang on corresponding ccTLDs respective countries. for example on example.com -which is the oldest of these sites- we have used Now should we also use link rel="canonical" href="example.com" on all ccTLDs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CyrilWilson0 -
Canonical Tag and Affiliate Links
Hi! I am not very familiar with the canonical tag. The thing is that we are getting traffic and links from affiliates. The affiliates links add something like this to the code of our URL: www.mydomain.com/category/product-page?afl=XXXXXX At this moment we have almost 2,000 pages indexed with that code at the end of the URL. So they are all duplicated. My other concern is that I don't know if those affilate links are giving us some link juice or not. I mean, if an original product page has 30 links and the affiliates copies have 15 more... are all those links being counted together by Google? Or are we losing all the juice from the affiliates? Can I fix all this with the canonical tag? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jorgediaz0