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.
-
Thanks Martijn
-
Just some more information about canonical tags, Matt Cutts has said that self-referring canonical tags like the one you described won't hurt your site. However, Bing said that it could negatively impact rankings, and to not put a tag if it lists its own url. If you are getting the majority of traffic from people using Bing (although it's not likely), you might want to consider removing the canonical tag.
Like Martijn said though, canonical tags are fine when used correctly.
-
Hi Eric,
Your canonical URL on this page is totally OK like this, as Moz also mentions in the report about the rel canonicals it's just a notice so not a warning or an error. They just give you a notice that this page is containing a canonical tag to make sure you're aware of this!
Hope this answers 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
-
404 or rel="canonical" for empty search results?
We have search on our site, using the URL, so we might have: example.com/location-1/service-1, or example.com/location-2/service-2. Since we're a directory we want these pages to rank. Sometimes, there are no search results for a particular location/service combo, and when that happens we show an advanced search form that lets the user choose another location, or expand the search area, or otherwise help themselves. However, that search form still appears at the URL example.com/location/service - so there are several location/service combos on our website that show that particular form, leading to duplicate content issues. We may have search results to display on these pages in the future, so we want to keep them around, and would like Google to look at them and even index them if that happens, so what's the best option here? Should we rel="canonical" the page to the example.com/search (where the search form usually resides)? Should we serve the search form page with an HTTP 404 header? Something else? I look forward to the discussion.
Technical SEO | | 4RS_John1 -
Questions about canonicals
Howdy Moz community, I had a question regarding canonicals. I help a business with their SEO, and they are a service company. They have one physical location, but they serve multiple cities in the state. My question is in regards to canonicals and unique content. I hear that a page with slightly differing content for each page won't matter as much, if most of the content is relevantly the same. This business wants to create service pages for at least 10 other cities they service. The site currently only have pages that are targeting one city location. I was wondering if it was beneficial to use a template to service each city and then put a canonical there to say that it is an identical page to the main city page? Example: our first city was san francisco, we want to create city pages for santa rosa, novato, san jose and etc. If the content for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, city were the same content as the 1st city, but just had the slight change with the city name would that hurt? Would putting a canonical help this issue, if i alert that it is the same as the 1st page? The reason I want to do this, is because I have been getting concerns from my copywriter that after the 5th city, they can't seem to make the services pages that much different from the first 4 cities, in terms of wording of the content and its structure. I want to know is there a simpler way to target multiple cities for local SEO reasons like geo targeted terms without having to think of a completely new way to write out the same thing for each city service page, as this is very time consuming on my end. Main questions? Will making template service pages, changing the city name to target different geographic locations and putting a canonical tag for the new pages created, and referring back to the main city page going to be effective in terms of me wanting to rank for multiple cities. Will doing this tell google my content is thin or be considered a duplicate? Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Redirecting Canonical Hostnames
Hi, I want to rewrite all the url pages of "site.com" to "www.site.com". I read the moz redirection article and i concluded that this would be the best approach. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.seomoz.org [NC]
Technical SEO | | bigrat95
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seomoz.org/$1 [L,R=301]. But i recieved this error: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. I tried this rewrite too... RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R=301] It worked but it just rewriting my domain** "site.com"** and not all the subs "site.com/fr/example.php" to "www.site.com" Why it doesn't work properly, it seem to be easy... Could it be a hosting problem? Is there another way to do it? <address> </address> <address> </address> <address> </address> <address> </address>0 -
Should we rel=nofollow these links ?
On our website, we have a section of free to low-cost tools that could help small business increase their productivity without spending big bucks. For example, this is the page for online collaboration tools: http://www.bdc.ca/EN/solutions/smart_tech/tech_advice/free_low_cost_applications/Pages/online_collaboration_tools.aspx None of the company pay anything to be on these list. We actually do quite a lot of research to chose which should be listed there and which should not. Recently, one of the company in our lists asked us to add rel=nofollow to the link to their website because they add been targeted by a manual action on Google and want their link profile to be as clean as possible (probably too clean). My question is : Should we add rel=nofollow to all these links ? Thanks, Jean-François Monfette
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Canonical URL
Hi there Our website www.snowbusiness.com has a non www version and this one has 398 backlinks. What is the best way of transfering this link value if i establish the www. address as the canonical URL? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
When we have 301 page is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex?
Hi, When we have a page as 301 (Permanent Redirect) is a Rel=Canonical needed or should we make 1 Noindex? Example http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 when clicked goes to http://www.Somename.com/blogs/whenittyam Should i noindex the below pages http://www.Somename.com/blog/138760 and add Rel=Canonical Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Canonical and Alternate REL
Hi I have a website which is mostly dynamic content from a database. In the header of the site I have a function which outputs the rel="canonical" link and in some cases the canonical is the page the user is visiting and not another page on the site but I still show it in the source. However we have just recently launched our mobile website which is stored on an M DOT domain (i.e. m.mydomain.com) which has different URL's to my main website so following Google's recommendations we have created rel="alternate" links on my desktop site to point to the equivalent mobile pages and on the mobile pages I have created rel="canonical" links which point back to the relevant desktop site keeping everything tidy.
Technical SEO | | yousayjump
My question is, is there an issue with having both a rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" in the source of of a single page on my desktop site? Is it conflicting or detrimental in anyway? Thanks for reading0 -
Crawl errors which ones should i sort out
Hi, just had my website updated to joomla 3.0 and i have around 4000 urls not found. now i have been told i need to redirect these but i would just like to check on here to make sure i am doing the right thing and the advice i have been given is not correct. I have been told these errors are the reason for the drop in rankings. I need to know if i should redirect all of these 4,000 urls or only the ones that are being linked to from outside of the site. I think about 3,000 of these have no links from outside of the site, but if i do not redirect them all then i am going to keep getting the error messages. around 2,000 of these url not found are from the last time we updated the site which was a couple of years ago and i thought they would have died off now. any advice on what i should do would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860