Google not reading my canonical links

[mker]

Hi All,

New to SEOmoz but so far love it.  My reports list tons of duplicate links and webmaster tools does as well.   In fact it just updated last night and added several hundred more.  I have the canonical tag on my products.  Here is a product example page:

http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/funny-christmas-cards/KX296a.html

Thank you for the help.

Matt

[mker]

It does thanks.

[NakulGoyal]

I would suggest you use a crawler like Screaming Frog to do an audit of your site and to make sure there are no coding issues. As for what Google is telling you, you can again using GWT to extract the duplicates it's reporting and crawl and use the Exact fuction in Excel to ensure the duplicates are indeed the same URL and when they are not, look at them and find out what the problem is. My guess is that you won't find a lot of issues and it's just the way GWT reports right now and that it does not factor in that URLA and URLB are canonicaled to URLB and therefore it should not say URLA and URLB are duplicate.

I hope this helps.

[mker]

Thanks Nakul.   What got me worried is that I had a coding error in my canonical tag and i fixed it about a month ago.   Was waiting for GWT to flush out the duplicates and then today they essentially doubled.   What do you make of this?

[NakulGoyal]

It's working exactly it should:

Go to Google and search for these:

cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/14131b.html
cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/featured/14131b.html
cache:http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.html

Each of those 3 times, I see:

This is Google's cache of http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.html.

Which means the correct URL / canonical is being crawled.

There's nothing you need to do. If possible, the only thing you can do is to try and ensure your CMS always generates the canonical version, not the others. But if you can'd do that, that's fine, that's what the canonical tag is for.

You are good. No need to worry. Your canonical tags are being read correct by Googlebot.

At some point, GWT and and SEOMoz will update to factor canonicals in their reporting of Duplicate Titles, Meta etc.

[mker]

Thanks for the reply.   Here are some more

http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/40016.html http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/40016.html

http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/christmas-cards/14131b.html
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/featured/14131b.html
http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/holiday-thank-you-cards/14131b.html

[NakulGoyal]

What are some other duplicate URls for this product ? I see the correct/canonical version of this page is indeeded indexed and cached in Google.

This is Google's cache of http://www.stonehousecollection.com/card/funny-christmas-cards/KX296a.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on May 8, 2013 23:17:24 GMT.