What is "canonical." And what do I need to do to fix it?
-
I'm seeing about 450 warnings on this.
What is "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."
And what do I need to do to fix it?
-
Anthony's definitely got the basics covered. How to handle any particular situation can get pretty tricky. I wrote a post about it, and that post got very long very fast:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world
I took a quick look at your campaign (I have Staff access), and it seems your login page is carrying an event ID - so every event is creating a different URL, but they all land on one page. That could spin out 100s of duplicates on Google, and that login page has little or no search value. A canonical tag would definitely be a good bet here.
You may have other issues going on, but clean up one at a time - getting that number down can definitely be beneficial and help boost your ranking power.
-
Anthony's response is correct for explaining what a canonical does. My response is for how to implement it. Say you have an online store that uses a bread crumb system. While you may have one main URL for a widget, multiple URLs could be created if visitors are taking multiple paths to find this widget. So say the main URL for this widget's page is: example.com/widget You could have many copies of this page on your website with different URLs. If you have URLs such as example.com/widget/1, example.com/widget/2, example.com/widget/3, and they all have the same content as example.com/widget, Google will see all of these pages as being duplicate content. So to take care of this you use a canonical. If you want example.com/widget to be the page that has the authority over the rest of the other URLs with the same content, you will need to create a canonical. The canonical for example.com/widget is: SEE EDIT BELOW Then you will want to take the canonical and put it somewhere inbetween the header for all of those URLs that have the same content. And as Anthony said www.example.com/widget is considered a different page than example.com/widget, so it would need the canonical from above as well, and the same goes for www. example.com/widget/1-3. http://www.ginzametrics.com/cheatsheet This link will take you to a great tool that generates meta tags and can also create a canonical link for you, if you don't want to type it all out. To make a canonical with the tool just copy and paste the main URL that you would like to use and it will create the canonical link below that you can copy and paste into the the pages head. EDIT: I don't think SEOmoz will let you post canonicals. But if you go the the link with the tool I provided you should still be able to create a canonical. It is a very simple and straight forward tool that can generate the canonical for you. Good luck.
-
There is a very good explanation of "canonical" at http://tinyurl.com/38ycpw8. by Jody Nimetz
The first part of it I have inserted here..... trust it helps:
Canonical URL: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.
Quite often canonical URLs were used to describe the homepage. The typical example used is that most people treat the following URLs as the same:
www.example.com
example.com
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.aspThe fact is that these are all different URLs. From a search engine perspective, this can cause a bit of an issue. Hence the idea of canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL (to present to the search engines) when there are multiple choices available. Typically a search engine, such as Google will attempt to pick the best URL that they feel is the authority for that page. However, sometimes they may in fact select the wrong one. Now let’s suggest that you have product pages that depending on how the user navigated to the pager returns a different URL… same page but different URL, now we have a duplicate content issue. Not to mention the nightmare for interlinking and external link inventories.
The easiest way to avoid this is to let the Search engines and the users know which is your “preferred URL” a.k.a canonical URL.............................
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
-
Will this URL structure: "domain.com/s/content-title" cause problems?
Hey all, We have a new in-house built too for building content. The problem is it inserts a letter directly after the domain automatically. The content we build with these pages aren't all related, so we could end up with a bunch of urls like this: domain.com/s/some-calculator
Technical SEO | | joshuaboyd
domain.com/s/some-infographic
domain.com/s/some-long-form-blog-post
domain.com/s/some-product-page Could this cause any significant issues down the line?0 -
Using rel=canonical
I have a set of static pages which were created with the purpose of targeting long tail keywords. That has resulted in Domain Authority dilution to some extent. I am now in the process of creating one page which will serve the same results but only after user selects the fields in the drop-down. I am planning to use rel=cannonical on the multiple pages pointing back to the new page. Will it serve the purpose?
Technical SEO | | glitterbug0 -
Disavowing the "right" bad backlinks
Hello, From july to november (this year), I gained 110.000 backlinks. Considering that I'm having trouble ranking well for any keyword in my niche (a niche that I was ranking #1 for several keywords and now I'm losing), I'm starting to believe that negative seo is affecting me. I already read several articles about negative seo, some telling this is a myth, others telling that negative SEO is alive and kicking... My site is about health and fitness in brazilian-portuguese language, and there's polish/chinese/english with warez/viagra/others drugs pointing to my domain and a massive links in comments with blogs without comment approval. Considering that all these new backlinks are not on my language and are clearly irrelevant, can I disavow them without fear of affecting my SEO even more ? Everytime you see someone talking about the disavow tool, is always the same warning: "cautiong when disavowing a link, you can hurt you site even more, removing a link that - in some way - was helping you". Any help or guidelines if I can remove this links safely would be greatly appreciated. Thank you and sorry for my english (it's not my native language) 5ZDjUcK.jpg
Technical SEO | | broncobr0 -
Rel Canonical Crawl Notices
Hello, Within the Moz report from the crawl of my site, it shows that I had 89 Rel Canonical notices. I noticed that all the pages on my site have a rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on. Specific example from my site is as follows: http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment has a Rel Canonical tag <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.automation-intl.com/resistance-welding-equipment" />. Is this self reference harmless and if so why does it create a notice in the crawl? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TopFloor0 -
Need suggestions on what might be causing rankings drop from top5 to "not in 50"?
Hi All, Below a list of 4 keywords & respective URLs which raked in top 3 to 5 till around 2 months back, now all these are "not in top 50", and I need help with finding the exact reason. Can you all please help with suggestions on what I should be looking for under the hood. Oticon Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/oticon-hearing-aids.aspx Phonak Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/phonak-hearing-aids.aspx Widex Hearing Aids: http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/widex-hearing-aids.aspx Resound Hearing Aids:http://www.leightonshearingcare.co.uk/hearing-aids/siemens-hearing-aids.aspx Thanks in advance, any help will be very much appreciated, checked all the basic stuff, and appreciate that there is scope for improvement in terms of page content, internal links etc etc, but cant figure out the reason for such a massive drop in such a short while given the fact, that the these URLs ranked in top 3 to 5 for a few years till 2 months back. Please help!!!
Technical SEO | | LolhcSEO0 -
Rel = Canonical in Blog Posting
Hello, I keep coming back to rel=canonical issues! I noticed when I "view pagesource" that my drupal blog posting automatically creates link rel="canonical" href="/sample-blog-title" /< pattern (with the > reversed) in the source code. I'm getting a lot of Rel=Canonical warnings and double content warnings from Seomoz so I've been trying to insert link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"< but the page won't retain the code for some reason. I'm entering the code in Plain Text, but saving the document as Full HTML. Is there a better piece of code I can put in to demonstrate that the original blog page is the original source? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Would you advise or not to include a sites name at the end of each title tage? Example "Top 3 things to do in New York | yoursite.com"
Having a discussion on if we should include our domain at the end of each site page. Re read over the following pages and question remove the brand to keep under 70 characters? or Shorten the page Title before the brand? Let the title exceed 70 characters? What is your thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Harley2g0 -
Canonical URL
In our campaign, I see this notices Tag value
Technical SEO | | shebinhassan
florahospitality.com/ar/careers.aspx Description
Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. What does it mean? Because If I try to view the source code of our site, it clearly gives me the canonical url.0