Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
-
I have encountered problems regarding rel canonical. When I ran On-Page Report Card it says
**Error: **
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
Canonical URL: "http://www.sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/"
Explanation: If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL.
NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply."
I just don't know how to fix this. I am using Wordpress SEO by Yoast but I haven't change any settings regarding rel canonical. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks
-
Hi Anthony,
Just checking in! Are you still having issues or were you able to resolve this? More than happy to help if you still need it.
Cyrus
-
The issue here might be because of how your site is seen by Google. After visiting the site, you can see that the www. part of the URL is removed across the site, so you're only left with sourcedental.create etc etc.
That's fine, but the example you gave above said that the canonical URL, what is defined as the original URL and the one that Google should rank, contains a www. This is inconsistent with that is happening with your site. Your canonical should match the site and not include the www.
Having said that, this shouldn't cause a major issue because, even if Google tried to index the www. version as per the canonical's directive, it 301 redirects to the non www. version anyway.
What's also confusing is that, having looked at your source code, your canonical URL is denominated as http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/, so it's actually set up properly.
If your canonical URL is set up to be http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/ in the Yoast plugin, then I'd say the problem lies more with the SEOMoz tool rather than your site. In which case, just ignore it as everything seems to be working as intended, from what I can see.
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
-
Using a hyphen in title tags and the impact of spaces
Hi I am trying to arrive at a best practice template for a title tag for my organization so does the following template still holds Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name will anything be impacted if I eliminate the spaces between the hyphen, will search bots be still able to treat the first one as a priority and the second as the secondary? Primary Keyword-Secondary Keyword | Brand Name thank you
On-Page Optimization | | lina_digital0 -
Product Landing page- Key Words used too often.
Hi There to everyone. I'm very new at SEO so I appreciate all the help I can get! Question: on my e-commerce website, one heading is "USB KEYS", then when you click on that, you get a page full of products with the word "USB KEYS" on the title, such as "4gig black USB KEY".. So then I do the MOZ Page grader and get a low score because on the product landing page it thinks I've used the word "USB KEYS" too much, like 72 times,.. But I have to use it- Cause it has to be in the product title! Is this ok!? thanks
On-Page Optimization | | cowhidesdirect0 -
Does anyone use Genesis Framework? If so can a newbie use it and a few other questions
Hi, So as I search the wonderful land of the internet, I see this Genesis framework brought up quite a bit. I have researched it for a few weeks, but it seems like it uses hooks instead of shortcodes. So I am curious if anyone has used it? And if so what your thoughts are about it? I am a COMPLETE newbie here, so hooks look scary. I am sure with time they will seem like second nature. They claim it has airtight security. So if you have used this framework, how is this any different than an updated stock wordpress site? I understand that vulnerabilities may be in plugins and such, but if it is really airtight, that seems great. Any thoughts are appreciated as I just want the best user experience. So many people use this framework, yet my site gets if I'm lucky 1000 views each month. It is a basic site to let people know we exist. So its not like I have a popular blog with 50,000 pageviews each month. But... going into the future, I want a pleasant and consistent user experience. Maybe a wordpress theme is all you need. Maybe a framework is more for developers. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated. Chris
On-Page Optimization | | asbchris0 -
Ecommerce- Keyword use in Product links on Category page
I'm wondering how Keyword use in Product links on Category pages can affect a pages rank? I have 1 site where this seems to be an issue but not on all categories. For this site, a site: keyword search ranks the category page as no.1 in the SERPS but a non-site: search shows 1 of the many products within the category as the highest ranking page (currently 20 in google) on this site. This product is probably the least likely to generate a conversion due to it's cost so this is less than ideal. The plural search of the keyword shows the category page and it ranks higher than the keyword itself (currently 9 in google) Category name and URL = keyword. The category is paginated with 12 products per page. Product URL and anchor text is brand-model-type (where type = keyword) I'd like to keep the product URLs and anchors as they are if I can as they are well searched terms themselves but I want to optimize a category page to rank for the keyword itself. Have any of you overcome a similar issue? Would adding more text to the category page dilute the issue?
On-Page Optimization | | MarcOZ0 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Duplicates and canonical problem
SEOmoz crowl diagnostic reports duplicates (title, content) issue on this addres: http://www.meblobranie.pl/biurowe/fotele-biurowe/promocje page already has canonical tag - is this a bug of crowler, or smth wrong on page?
On-Page Optimization | | SITS0 -
Canonical to the page itself?
Hello, I'd like to know what happens when you use canonical to the same page itself, like: Page "example.com" rel canonical="example.com" Does that impact in something? Bad or good? See ya!
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil1 -
Why is On-Page showing canonical wrong?
I'm trying to use the On-Page report card and it's saying that my rel=canonical is wrong, I've looked and I can't see anything wrong with it, am I missing something? The url is www.harrisonlighting.co.uk/childrens-lights.html
On-Page Optimization | | HarrisonLighting0 -
What reasons exist to use noindex / robots.txt?
Hi everyone. I realise this may appear to be a bit of an obtuse question, but that's only because it is an obtuse question. What I'm after is a cataloguing of opinion - what reasons have SEOs had to implement noindex or add pages to their robots.txt on the sites they manage?
On-Page Optimization | | digitalstream0