Canonical Confusion
-
Hey guys,
I'm having a hard time grasping canonical links and the warnings I'm getting on my report card.
I'm using Yoast SEO Plug-In and can see that every page on my site has a canonical reference to the URL of the page I'm at.
Can someone please enlighten me on this subject. I'm reading everything I can about Canonicalization (honestly...an easier word please) but I does not make sense yet.
Thanks!
I added the notice I'm getting on my report card.
This is my domain http://bbguard.com.ve
-
Great! Thanks for the reply.
I'll get to it today.
F.
-
Yes I would say so. Choose one and go with it.
You can set your .htaccess file to redirect non www to www. If you can access a page with and without www then google will index both and issue you with a duplicate content warning.
-
From what I've been reading, search engines do consider those two to be the same URL (or at least do a good job at figuring that out).
Apparently they might be interpreted as different URLs. This adds to the confusion
From reading 3 articles and watching one video I have changed my understanding of this 4 times.
Can someone expand on this a bit further?
-
Ok, I see where I made a mistake:
I did the report card using http://www.bbguard.com.ve/ and it gave an error because the canonical is set up to be http://bbguard.com.ve
I just did the report card using http://bbguard.com.ve/ and it passed.
Is the www vs non www something I need to resolve?
-
Fabian
I need the url of the page this came from. When I looked at the site, every page I looked at had the canonical correct, but the first time I used mozbar on home page it did not show. When I inspected it, you had it in correctly. I went through 4 other pages and all show canonical is correct.
I then ran on page report card and, again all is well. If you ran it in a campaign, just give me the url of the page that is not correct.What it is saying usually means someone did something like inadvertently used the home page url for the canon on another, etc.
Best
Edit: here is On Page Report Card result for http://bbguard.com.ve/ attached as image.
There is no prob with the home page.
-
Only difference is see is that the page:
http://bbguard.com.veHas a rel value:
http://bbguard.com.ve/In the eyes of a search engine I am not sure that these URLs are identical. I would make them match exactly.
Are you only having this problem for the home page or are you getting warnings for other pages?
Best regards,
Rasmus
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 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 -
Duplicate Content & Rel Canonical Tag not working
I'm really questioning the legitimacy of the duplicate content flags with moz. I'm building a website that sells home decor products and a lot of the pages are similar in structure (As would be expected with a store that sells thousands of individual products). It seems a little overkill to me to flag the following pages as duplicate content. They have different urls, titles, h1, h2, and h3 tages, different meta tags, etc. Right now, it's saying that the following have duplicate page content: http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com
Moz Pro | | cp_web
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/pillows/christmas-vacation-embroidered-pillow
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/throws/camo-bear-throw
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/teapots/wonderland-teapot
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/rag-rugs/cambridge-rug-36x60
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/lodge-quilts/king%2C-woodland
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/rag-rugs/redmon-rag-rug-36x60
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/valances/hearthside-valance-72x14
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/valances/hearthside-valance-72x14
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/lodge-quilts/king,-woodland
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/teapots/wonderland-teapot
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/throws/camo-bear-throw
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/accessories/home-place-tumbler
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/lodge-quilts/king,-woodland
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/rag-rugs/cambridge-rug-36x60
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/pillows/christmas-vacation-embroidered-pillow
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/lodge-quilts/king%2C-woodland?pi=18
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/donna-sharp/lodge-quilts/king%2C-woodland
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/accessories/home-place-tumbler
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/park-designs/rag-rugs/redmon-rag-rug-36x6 Any ideas? Also, it seems like it's not honoring the rel-canonical tag. It keeps saying that pages with a rel canonical tag are duplicates when some of the urls that it's flagging shouldn't even be indexed because of the canonical tag. The "pi" in the query string should not be indexed! http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=3
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=6
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=7
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=6
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=10
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=8
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=8
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=7
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=7
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=1
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=8
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=5
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=10
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=3
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=5
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=4
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=9
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-%26-quilts/shams/standard-shams
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=1
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=6
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=1
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=5
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=2
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=9
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=4
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=3
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-%26-quilts/shams/standard-shams
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-%26-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=9
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=10
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?pi=18&page=2
http://countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=2
http://www.countryporchhomedecor.com/bedding-&-quilts/shams/standard-shams?page=40 -
Is your live site supposed to have rel canonical tags?
I recently started working for a company and got them to use Moz and I have found that our secure site and our live sites are creating "duplicate content" according to the Crawl Diagnostics feature. On our secure site we have rel canonical tags pointing to our live site. I'm not super familiar with rel canonical tags, but our developer says we're doing the right thing. Would love any insight you guys may have if this is actually duplicate content or not. Thanks so much!
Moz Pro | | Chase_Cleckner0 -
Update in Moz spider/tools?? Flagging duplicate content / ignoring canonical
Hi all, Has there been an update in the SEOmoz crawling software? We now have thousands of dupe content/page title warnings for paginated product page URLs that have correctly formatted canonicals. e.g. http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx ... has following pages with identical content that have been flagged: http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=6 http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/olive-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx?p=true&rspage=4 ..plus 4 more URL's. But they all have canonical set. There's even a notice at the bottom of report that tells us there's a canonical set to http://www.woolovers.com/british-wool/mens/tweed-green/wool-countryman-suede-patch-sweater.aspx What gives, SEOmoz ?? Thanks Michael
Moz Pro | | LawrenceNeal0 -
Does the Crawl Diagnosis - Duplicate Page Content account for a canonical meta tags?
I see the same page listed 3 time (with different query params). But on each I have a meta tag pointing to the correct canonical url. By still seeing all three listed, does that mean there is an error with my meta tag?
Moz Pro | | Simantel0 -
Crawl Diagnostics Shows thousands of 302's from a single url. I'm confused
Hi guys I just ran my first campaign and the crawl diagnostics are showing some results I'm unfamiliar with.. In the warnings section it shows 2,838 redirects.. this is where I want to focus. When I click here it shows 5 redirects per page. When I go to click on page 2, or next page, or any other page than page 1 for that matter... this is where things get confusing. Nothing shows. Downloading the csv reveals that 2,834 of these are all showing: URL: http://www.mydomain.com/401/login.php url: http://www.mydomain.com/401/login.php referrer: http://www.mydomain.com/401/login.php location_header: http://www.mydomain.com/401/login.php I guess I'm just looking for an explanation as to why it's showing so many to the same page and what possible actions can be taken on my part to correct it (if needed). Thanks in advance
Moz Pro | | sethwb0 -
Can overly dynamic URLs be overcome with canonical meta tags?
I tried searching for questions regarding dynamic URLs and canonical tags, but I couldn't find anything s hopefully this hasn't been covered. There are a large number of overly dynamic URLs reported in our site crawl (>7,000). I haven't looked at each of these, but most of these either have a canonical meta tag or have are indicated as FOLLOW, NO INDEX pages. Will these be enough to overcome any negative SEO impact that may come from overly dynamic URLs? We are down to almost 0 critical errors and this is now the biggest problem reported by the site crawl after too many on page links.
Moz Pro | | afmaury0 -
SEOMOZ Canonical notices using Wordpress
I keeping getting the notice from SEO Moz Crawls relating to Canonical issues. I have tried Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO and both insert the appropriate canonical code... Can anyone help determine why the crawls report this notice? Check out seoontario.ca\testamonials for an example. Could it be because the site in my SEOMOZ crawl does not have the http:// prefix? I've now installed FV Simpler SEO, a variant of All In Once SEO, but am getting the same canonical code...
Moz Pro | | kbryanton0