Rel Canonical tag using Wordpress SEO plugin
-
Hi team
I hope this is the right forum for asking this question.
I have a site http://hurunuivillage.com built on Wordpress 3.5.1 using a child theme on Genesis 1.9. We're using Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin and I thought it was configured correctly but the Crawl Diagnostics report has identified an issue with the Rel Canonical tag on the sites pages.
I have not edited the plugin settings so am surprised the SEOMoz Crawl has picked up a problem.
Example:
Page URL is http://hurunuivillage.com/
Tag Value http://hurunuivillage.com/ (exactly the same)
Page Authority 39
Linking Root Domains 23
Source Code
Considering the popularity of the plugin I'm surprised I have not been able to find tutorials to find what I'm doing wrong or should be doing better.
Thanks in advance.
Best
Nic
-
I appreciate all your responses.
Paul, thanks for your detailed reply.
Best
Nic
-
Unfortunately, Nic, the SEOMoz tool does a really bad job of explaining that the Notices section of the on-page reports does NOT mean those areas have problems. The tool is simply informing you that those specific elements appear on your website. It is then up to you to decide whether they're appropriate or not. (The exact wording is "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". Pretty vague)
In the case of the canonical URLs, they're definitely a good thing and as neither you nor Oleg see any problems with them, all is fine.
As an example, that Notices section would also tell you if it found no-follow tags. If those had been added accidentally, they could be disastrous, so having the tool tell you they exist could warn you that someone had made a mistake. Or it could simply be that you put them in place on purpose. See? Judgement call.
Hope that helps;
Paul
-
SEOmoz alerts you because they're not really needed. They will not hurt you.
-
Maybe SEOMoz crawl has encountered a problem with your self-canonical tags. As Oleg told you, you don't have any issue with your canonical tags, it's just a matter of personal opinion to use self canonicals or not.
If you're afraid of possible scraper re-publishing your content and if you use url-based user sessions it may be worthwhile to have. But it doesn't hurt in any way.
-
Thanks for the quick reply.
Because the install is "out-of-the-box" I expected they were right.
What is SEOMoz trying to tell me about the tags? -
Your canonicals looks all good to me, I wouldn't worry about it.
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
-
"Yet-to-be-translated" Duplicate Content: is rel='canonical' the answer?
Hi All, We have a partially internationalized site, some pages are translated while others have yet to be translated. Right now, when a page has not yet been translated we add an English-language page at the url https://our-website/:language/page-name and add a bar for users to the top of the page that simply says "Sorry, this page has not yet been translated". This is best for our users, but unfortunately it creates duplicate content, as we re-publish our English-language content a second time under a different url. When we have untranslated (i.e. duplicate) content I believe the best thing we can do is add which points to the English page. However here's my concern: someday we _will_translate/localize these pages, and therefore someday these links will _not _have duplicate content. I'm concerned that a long time of having rel='canonical' on these urls, if we suddenly change this, that these "recently translated, no longer pointing to cannonical='english' pages" will not be indexed properly. Is this a valid concern?
Technical SEO | | VectrLabs0 -
Pageing page and seo meta tag questions
Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Rel=canonical overkill on duplicate content?
Our site has many different health centers - many of which contain duplicate content since there is topic crossover between health centers. I am using rel canonical to deal with this. My question is this: Is there a tipping point for duplicate content where Google might begin to penalize a site even if it has the rel canonical tags in place on cloned content? As an extreme example, a site could have 10 pieces of original content, but could then clone and organize this content in 5 different directories across the site each with a new url. This would ultimately result in the site having more "cloned" content than original content. Is this at all problematic even if the rel canonical is in place on all cloned content? Thanks in advance for any replies. Eric
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
What if I point my canonicals to a URL version that is not used in internal links
My web developer has pointed the "good" URLs that I use in my internal link structure (top-nav/footer) to another duplicate version of my pages. Now the URLs that receive all the canonical link value are not the ones I use on my website. is this a problem and why??? In theory the implementation is good because both have equal content. But does it harm my link equity if it directs to a URL which is not included in my internal link architecture.
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Using Rel=Author with Multiple Contributors
I have multiple contributors who provide content on our page. I have created an authors page that shows the picture and bio of each author along with their Google+ profile link. Each profile link goes to the authors respective profile where I have had them verify themselves as contributors. My question is will Google see each of these authors and attribute the rel=author tag correctly (even though they are listed on the same profile page) or will Google only take the first person I point to for Rel=Author?
Technical SEO | | PLEsearch0 -
Campaign Issue: Rel Canonical - Does this mean it should be "on" or "off?"
Hello, somewhat new to the finer details of SEO - I know what canonical tags are, but I am confused by how SEOmoz identifies the issue in campaigns. I run a site on a wordpress foundation, and I have turned on the option for "canonical URLs" in the All in one SEO plugin. I did this because in all cases, our content is original and not duplicated from elsewhere. SEOmoz has identified every one of my pages with this issue, but the explanation of the status simply states that canonical tags "indicate to search engines which URL should be seen as the original." So, it seems to me that if I turn this OFF on my site, I turn off the notice from SEOmoz, but do not have canonical tags on my site. Which way should I be doing this? THANK YOU.
Technical SEO | | mrbradleyferguson0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
How do you add a description to the Meta Description area to Tag Pages in Wordpress? This way I do not get the errors: "Missing Meta Description Tag" from SEOMoz Bot? Thanks!
I tried to add descriptions to my tags in Wordpress (well actually one to test), but I still keep getting the "Missing Meta Description Tag" error. Any suggestions on how to fix this in Wordpress? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jhblogger0