Correct Canonical Reference

[dimanyc]

Aloha,

This is probably a noob question, but here we go:

I got a CMS e-commerce, which does not allow static "rel=canonical" declaration in the header and can only work with third-party modules (xml packages) that append "rel=canonical" to all pages dynamic pages within the URL. As a result, I have pages I'm declaring incomplete rel="canonical" as such:

Instead of:

rel="canonical" src="www.domainname.com/category.aspx"

I get:

rel="canonical" src="/category.aspx"

Coincidentally (or not), after the implementation of the canonical tag, pages that were continuously increasing in rankings started dropping, and, within a week, disappeared from the index completely.

Could the drop be a result of my canonical links pointing to incomplete URLs? If so, by fixing this issue, do I stand a chance of recovering my pages' SERPs?

[Dr-Pete]

It's possible that the canonical timing was just a coincidence and something deeper is going on, but I look at it this way - if it's easy to fix, fix it, and then you'll know for sure. It can be really tough to separate technical indexation problems from penalties.

[dimanyc]

Absolutely!

What gets me wondering is that only two pages have been removed from the index and do not appear in 1-1000 search results, others just dropped in rankings. Maybe, the two "most optimized" pages with most content and links got most "attention" from Google and got removed first.

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, I could've sworn they recommended not using relative paths somewhere, but now I can't find that reference. I'd just make doubly sure they're resolving correctly. Given that these pages disappeared completely from the index, it's hard to believe the canonical tag addition was just an accident. You always have to start with what you know, and you know this changed.

[dimanyc]

Thanks for the link!

It says that canonical CAN be a relative path, and that Google will relate the path the the base URL _(section:"Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as ?"). _

I will be posting my results here. Let's see if pages get re-indexed and recovered in SERPs. Hope this helps someone who is have a similar issue.

[Dr-Pete]

I haven't specifically tested the impact of relative URLs, but to the best of my knowledge, all canonical tags should be absolute URLs (including "http://"). I would've figured Google would just ignore the incomplete tags, at worst, but it's certainly possible they're attributing them incorrectly.

Since you know you made the change and that they pages have de-indexed, I'd definitely fix the issue, even if it's on a few test pages (not sure how difficult the implementation is).

One note - this is probably just a typo in your question, but it's href="", not src="" in the canonical tag. Google's reference page on the tag is actually pretty good:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[dimanyc]

As I mentioned, right after the implementation, some of the landing pages I optimized disappeared from the index completely, some began dropping.

[mytouchoftech]

Can you check to make sure those pages are still indexed by Google?  If the pages that were indexed are no longer indexed, then your canonical links have interfered with the ranking.