Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Broken canonical link errors
-
Hello,
Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that.
Eg.
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error.Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong?
Thanks,
G -
Great, thanks for your note Paul, I will filter through as you suggest!
-
I would us a different
rel="canonical" only url for the canonical & kee the microdata link as just a link.
I agree it is probably Just the tool but from what I can see mixing microdata & the canonical is not the best way to go.
<link rel="canonical" href="http: example.com="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>
you want a free way to test up to 500 pages https://screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ like Paul said any tool can be wrong but it looks like you should not mix the canonical something the end Users can click on
tom
-
Your understanding of canonical tags is correct, GhillC.
If Tools are showing errors for those canonical tags you've listed, then the tools are wrong.
As long as the protocol and subdomain prefix (or not) exactly match and the only difference is the exclusion of the parameters (the "?" and the stuff after it) then the canonicals are correct.
Any tool's reports have to be filtered through your own understanding and knowledge. They often get things wrong. That's on eof the key differences between experienced SEOs and less-experienced. They kow when to question what an automated tool is telling them. So good on ya for questioning the results!
Paul
-
Thanks both.
Though I do believe that I get a good enough understanding of the canonical tag structure.
What I don't understand is why some SEO tools are returning an error with few of these tags.Here is the page URL:
https://www.domain.com/ae/products/shopby/product-type-accessories.html?___store=en_aeAnd here is the canonical tag that returns the error:
As per your comment, I want the URL without the query string to rank and the traffic associated to the URL above to benefit "accessories.html".
At first I thought it was due to "itemprop" which technically should not be combined with a rel attribute (source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31621308/itemprop-and-rel-attributes-on-same-element)
But since all the pages of the website I'm working on contains canonical tags with both elements and only a handful of them returns a canonical tag error, I guess it comes from something else. -
If you need anyone to back up what Roman said he's exactly right.
You need to add the canonical to your site so it is self-referencing I would not add it to any URLs that have parameters/query strings or any URL that you want to be in Google's index.
In your example you show the same page twice I added https:// just to make it a full URL for the example and please do that when you add the canonical's
With the rel canonical, you're telling Google that your parameter is not something you want to rank for
You want https://domain.com/page.html to rank
** not**
**Page URL: https://domain.com/page.html?xxxx **
So as Roman said you would add a rel canonical like this below. Please keep in mind when you add these you must add HTTP or HTTPS depending on what your site is up for as well as www. or non-www. & always use absolute URLs
For example, search crawlers might be able to reach your homepage in all of the following ways:
Cite: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization
More references
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
- https://moz.com/blog/rel-canonical
- https://varvy.com/rel/canonical.html
I hope that helps,
Tom
-
A canonical tag (aka "rel canonical") is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or "duplicate" content appearing on multiple URLs. Practically speaking, the canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results.
So if you have a page such as
www.mywesbite.com you should have a canonical tag on that page like this one
on your headerSo you should check your source code to check if the URL is ok or it's missing
These are some links you should read
Hope this information will answer your question
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
-
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or postively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please?
Does anyone know the linking of hashtags on Wix sites does it negatively or positively impact SEO. It is coming up as an error in site crawls 'Pages with 404 errors' Anyone got any experience please? For example at the bottom of this blog post https://www.poppyandperle.com/post/face-painting-a-global-language the hashtags are linked, but they don't go to a page, they go to search results of all other blogs using that hashtag. Seems a bit of a strange approach to me.
Technical SEO | | Mediaholix0 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Link rel="prev" AND canonical
Hi guys, When you have several tabs on your website with products, you can most likely navigate to page 2, 3, 4 etc...
Technical SEO | | AdenaSEO
You can add the link rel="prev" and link rel="next" tags to make sure that 1 page get's indexed / ranked by Google. am I correct? However this still means that all the pages can get indexed, right? For example a webshop makes use of the link rel="prev" and ="next" tags. In the Google results page though, all the seperate tabs pages are still visible/indexed..
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=1
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=24
http://www.domain.nl/watches/?tab=19
etc..... Can we prevent this, and make sure only the main page get's indexed and ranked, by adding a canonical link on every 'tab page' to the main page --> www.domain.nl/watches/ I hope I explained it well and I'm looking forward to hearing from you. Regards, Tom1 -
301 redirect: canonical or non canonical?
Hi, Newbie alert! I need to set up 301 redirects for changed URLs on a database driven site that is to be redeveloped shortly. The current site uses canonical header tags. The new site will also use canonical tags. Should the 301 redirects map the canonical URL on the old site to the corresponding canonical for the new design . . . or should they map the non canonical database URLs old and new? Given that the purpose of canonicals is to indicate our preferred URL, then my guess is that's what I should use. However, how can I be sure that Google (for example) has indexed the canonical in every case? Thx in anticipation.
Technical SEO | | ztalk1120 -
How to fix broken links?
Hi, I use WordPress CMS with Yoast SEO plugin. I have just found out that my 403 errors increased dramatically. It seems that all my tags below of each post are being broken for some reason. When i click on the tags i get the following massage: **403 Forbidden Request forbidden by administrative rules. ** I assume it has something to do with the configuration within Yoast SEO plugin. Dose anyone know how should i fix that? Thanks, Raviv evsGujA
Technical SEO | | Indiatravelz0 -
4XX Errors - Adding %5c%5c to Links
Hi all 😃 Hope someone can help me with this. The internal links on my hubby's business site occasionally break and add %5c%5c%5c endlessly to the end of the url - like this: site.com/about/hours-of-operation/\\\\\\\\% I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is doing this and while it has happened to me from time to time, I can't recreate it. My crawl diagnostics here in my SEOMox campaign show 19-20 urls doing this - it's nuts. Any insight? Thank you!! Jennifer ~PotPieGirl
Technical SEO | | potpiegirl0 -
How to remove the 4XX Client error,Too many links in a single page Warning and Cannonical Notices.
Firstly,I am getting around 12 Errors in the category 4xx Client error. The description says that this is either bad or a broken link.How can I repair this ? Secondly, I am getting lots of warnings related to too many page links of a single page.I want to know how to tackle this ? Finally, I don't understand the basics of Cannonical notices.I have around 12 notices of this kind which I want to remove too. Please help me out in this regard. Thank you beforehand. Amit Ganguly http://aamthoughts.blogspot.com - Sustainable Sphere
Technical SEO | | amit.ganguly0 -
Syndication: Link back vs. Rel Canonical
For content syndication, let's say I have the choice of (1) a link back or (2) a cross domain rel canonical to the original page, which one would you choose and why? (I'm trying to pick the best option to save dev time!) I'm also curious to know what would be the difference in SERPs between the link back & the canonical solution for the original publisher and for sydication partners? (I would prefer not having the syndication partners disappeared entirely from SERPs, I just want to make sure I'm first!) A side question: What's the difference in real life between the Google source attribution tag & the cross domain rel canonical tag? Thanks! PS: Don't know if it helps but note that we can syndicate 1 article to multiple syndication partners (It would't be impossible to see 1 article syndicated to 50 partners)
Technical SEO | | raywatson0