Canonical Confusion

[FDSConsulting]

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

swG7x.png

[FDSConsulting]

Great! Thanks for the reply.

I'll get to it today.

F.

[rasmusbang]

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.

[FDSConsulting]

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?

[FDSConsulting]

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?

[RobertFisher]

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.

QEosn.png

[rasmusbang]

Only difference is see is that the page:
http://bbguard.com.ve

Has 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