REL = cannonical and web app
-
I started a web app campaign for a site that I recently finished. It had no errors or warnings, but issued rel=cannonical notices for every page on the site.
What does this mean?
-
Yessir. SEOmoz is just trying to have your back - there's no need for concern whatsoever.
-
I'm using Wordpress, which insets the rel=cannonical tag on every page, and they are pointed correctly, so I I'm OK, right?
-
Items under the "Notices" section are just that - notices. If a canonical tag points to a URL other than the page it is on, the notice comes up. This is because engines will not count this page as the reference resource, meaning it won't have the opportunity to rank - which could be a terrible situation if you're using the tag incorrectly. SEOmoz includes the notice just to make sure you're targeting the right page.
You can learn more about canonicalization and the rel="canonical" tag at the below resources:
- Canonicalization Best Practices
- Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement In SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
- Complete Guide to Rel Canonical - How To and Why (Not)
- 301 Redirect or Rel=Canonical - Which One Should You Use?
Additionally, you can find information about other crawl diagnostics in the SEOmoz Help Forums.
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
-
Meta tags in Single Page Apps
Since the deprecation of the AJAX Crawling Scheme back last October I am curious as to when Googlebot actually reads meta tag information from a page. We have a website at whichledlight.com that is implemented using emberjs. Part of the site is our results pages (i.e. gu10-led-bulbs). This page updates the meta and link tags in the head of the document for things like canonicalisation and robots, but can only do so after the page finishes loading and the JavaScript has been run.When the AJAX crawling scheme was still in place we were able to prerender these pages (including the modified meta and link tags) and serve these to Googlebot. Now Googlebot no longer uses these prerendered snapshots and instead is sophisticated enough load and run our site.So the question I have is does Googlebot read the meta and links tags downloaded from the original response or does it wait until the page finishes rendering before reading them (including any modifications that have been performed on them)
Technical SEO | | TrueluxGroup1 -
Duplicated rel=author tags (x 3) on WordPress pages, any issue with this?
Hi,
Technical SEO | | jeffwhitfield
We seem to have duplicated rel=author tags (x 3) on WordPress pages, as we are using Yoast WordPress SEO plugin which adds a rel=author tag into the head of the page and Fancier Author Box plugin which seems to add a further two rel=author tags toward the bottom of the page. I checked the settings for Fancier Author Box and there doesn't seem to be the option to turn rel=author tags off; we need to keep this plugin enabled as we want the two tab functionality of the author bio and latest posts. All three rel=author tags seem to be correctly formatted and Google Structured Data Testing Tool shows that all authorship rel=author markup is correct; is there any issue with having these duplicated rel=author tags on the WordPress pages?
I tried searching the Q&A but couldn't find anything similar enough to what I'm asking above. Many thanks in advance and kind regards.0 -
Rel="next"
Hi I was just wondering if there is any difference in using rel='next' rather than rel="next". Would it still work the same way? I mean using the apostrophes differently, would it matter? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | pikka0 -
Dup Content - ASP.NET Web Forms (Default.aspx)
What are some best practices or tips for handling duplicate content issues for sites built on ASP.NET Web Forms? One duplicate content issue I see all the time is www.xyz.com/pages/ and www.xyz.com/pages/Default.aspx. While I'm able to canonicalize the www and non-www version of the domain in the web config file I'm not sure what the best way is to remove or keep the default.aspx from being indexed. I know we can specify certain parameters for the search engines to ignore but isn't it better to have this done on the server side?
Technical SEO | | RedCaffeine0 -
Web Master Tools: change of address
Hello, Hope you can help with an issue I'm having:www.brand-kw1-kw2.com (eg name of course) has moved to www.brand.comAll settings are done - like I did before when moving and setting up a new domain for an older site. (30q redirects - all versions are verified in WMT).However, when the change of adress features is "called out" I get the message: "We couldn't verify www.brand-kw1-kw2.com To submit a change of address, www.brand-kw1-kw2.com must be verified using the same method as brand-kw1-kw2.com. Add www.brand-kw1-kw2.com to your account and verify ownership, then try again." So dose it basically saying that I have to use the same method to verify both the www and non-www version ? Dose it make sense ? It sounds silly. Again, all version are verified and visibile in WMT already - I don't know how in the past those verifications were done but everything is looking good now. Is here a fix for this issue ? (I've moved several but this is the first issue I've encountered) Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | eyepaq0 -
Querystring params, rel canonical and SEO
I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params. There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO? If so, by how much? Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Imlementation of Rel connical
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not This is an excellent post. But I couldn't find out one thing: all examples show the whle URL and I wonder if it's a problem to show a relative path instead is a problem? An example: you are on www.domain.com/articles/articles1.htm and you would like to Recl Connical to you are on www.domain.com/articles/articles2.htm Now, would both of these get it done right? Thanks, Andre
Technical SEO | | viventuraSEO0 -
Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical
When using the On page report card I get a critical error on Rel Canonical Im not sure if I have understood this right but I think that my problem is that I own a Norwegian Domain name which is www.danske-båten.no This domain works great in norwegian, but I get problems with english (foreign) browsers. My english domain name is http://www.danske-båten.no. When you buy a domain name with the letter Å you get a non norwegian domain name as well. (dont quite get the tecnical aspect of it) Så when I publish a page (using wordpress if that means anything) I get this message: Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical Moderate fix <dl> <dt>Canonical URL</dt> <dd>"http://www.danske-båten.no/ferge-oslo-københavn/"</dd> <dt>Explanation</dt> <dd>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.</dd> <dt>Recommendation</dt> <dd>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.</dd> <dd>So What to do to fix this?
Technical SEO | | stlastla
</dd> </dl>0