Rel-canonical tag confusion
-
I had our web development company implement the rel-canonical tag on all pages of our website to get rid of the duplicate content months ago. However, when I use the On Page optimizer tool (in previous version) it would tell me I'm not using the rel-canonical tag correctly on the page I was grading and when I untagged use rel-canonical tag in our CMS (which was pointing to the correct page) my grade would go to an A. Now with the new version it says I'm using it wrong either way, when I have the tag used in my CMS and everything else is good I have a B, but one I click to not use Rel-canonical tag I have a C. Both ways it shows up in On-page tool without a check in Apprpriate Use of Rel Canonical.
I've attached pictures. In C version it says - Canonical URL "/info/solutions/" and "/info/solutions/"
In B version: Canonical URL "/info/solutions/"
What am I doing wrong and how do i fix this? Because ALL of my grades have dropped to Bs and Cs.
Thanks!
iklEHOjJLZE4966 [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/5BYcV][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5BYcV.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) 5BYcV
-
The tag should work fine with the partial URL.
If you are still concerned about the warning, try adding the base href tag within the of your page. It would be as follows:
<base href="http://www.aircycle.com/">
This tag explicitly specifies the base URL to which all partial URLs are built upon for a given page. Try adding this tag to just the one page, then running the report again to see if that resolves the issue. If it does, then you know what change the tool is requesting.
To be clear, the canonical tag you are using should be fine for search engines assuming there is no other issue. This may be a specific issue with the tool.
Since testing the base href tag, and the full URL are relatively quick and easy to do, my suggestion is to spend 10 minutes performing these tests to see the results. If the tests work, then you can contact the SEOmoz help desk and report your findings as an issue with the tool. It could be a bug or limitation with the tool.
-
So does the tag still work with the partial URL or no? It worked before, so I'm not sure what the ordeal is now but that the new CMS is causing SEOmoz some difficulty reading this.
I'd have to have my web development company fix it to the full URL.
-
I am going to take my best guess, which would need to be tested.
The tool is seeing a partial URL and it does not like it. The best way to confirm the issue is add the complete URL and then test the page. If it passes, then I am correct.
<link href='http://www.aircycle.com/info/solutions/' rel='canonical' />
-
the missing one just shows the Canonical url listing the rest of the URL twice.
B version: "/info/solutions/"
c version: "/Info/solutions/" and "/info/solutions/"
-
-
The first and third images appear the same to me, and the second image is a broken link.
"/info/solutions/" is not a complete URL. It can't be indexed.
Can you possibly share the URL to an example of a web page with this issue?
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
-
How long do changes in title tags take to affect SEO?
This is kind of a loaded question. I'm completely new to SEO. I think my boss signed up for Moz Pro sometime in February and started adding data to our Ecommerce site to help with rankings. Sometime before this, I changed some of the title tags on the site (trying to help with organic search and CTR). I did not do a site wide change.... just changed maybe 10-20 (just a guess). I did it with keywords in mind but did not make note of when I did it. I didn't really know better at the time, and I did not have access to Google Analytics or Moz Pro. I was looking through the ranking data/graph for February and March. It won't let me look before February 29th (so that's why I think my boss started the Mos Pro subscription around at that time). On that day it said we ranked 12 keywords in the 1-3 spot, and then the following week (march 7) it went down to 6. I don't think or know if any major site changes were implemented, so I'm not sure why that happened and if it has anything to do with my title tag changes I did maybe a week or two before (again I am not sure when I did this unfortunately). Since then the keyword ranking numbers stayed about the same with organic traffic slowly going down (it could be because we are getting out of season for our industry though). The second week of March the site was upgraded and since then the menu has been completely changed around. Last week I did a site wide title tag change. So the minor changes I made in February are no longer in effect anyway. I added more keywords to Moz earlier this week and the number for 1-3 spot keywords went up from 6 to 20. It also says my ranking moved up 4 keywords and down 13 keywords. Anyway, I am wondering how seriously I should take these changes and if I'm damaging the site. I am new to Moz Pro also so all the data you can access is kind of confusing/overwhelming.
Moz Pro | | AliMac260 -
Page with "Missing Title Tag" isn't a page
Hello, I am going through the various errors that the Moz Pro Crawl report and some non-existent pages keep coming up in the report. For example, one error category is "Missing Title Tag" with one page identified. But this page http://www.immigroup.com/news/“http%3A/crs.yorku.ca”?page=2 isn't real. It would have been a 404 were there not a redirect for everything that is /news/gobbledygook to /news. So my question is: when moz (or GA for that matter) identifies these pages as "real" and having errors, do I need to take this seriously? And what do I do about it? Thanks! George
Moz Pro | | canadageorge0 -
The META title tag, Presision
Do you have an opinion on the META title tag, useful or can I just remove it? Thank You THIS TAG : & Yes OF corse I Know the real title <title>blala</title> : Is SUPER IMPORTANT! Thank YOU 🙂
Moz Pro | | Vale70 -
Crawl Diagnostics - Canonical Question
On one of my sites I have 61 notices for Rel Canonical. Is it bad to have these or is this just something that's informative?
Moz Pro | | kadesmith0 -
Roger keeps telling me my canonical pages are duplicates
I've got a site that's brand spanking new that I'm trying to get the error count down to zero on, and I'm basically there except for this odd problem. Roger got into the site like a naughty puppy a bit too early, before I'd put the canonical tags in, so there were a couple thousand 'duplicate content' errors. I put canonicals in (programmatically, so they appear on every page) and waited a week and sure enough 99% of them went away. However, there's about 50 that are still lingering, and I'm not sure why they're being detected as such. It's an ecommerce site, and the duplicates are being detected on the product page, but why these 50? (there's hundreds of other products that aren't being detected). The URLs that are 'duplicates' look like this according to the crawl report: http://www.site.com/Product-1.aspx http://www.site.com/product-1.aspx And so on. Canonicals are in place, and have been for weeks, and as I said there's hundreds of other pages just like this not having this problem, so I'm finding it odd that these ones won't go away. All I can think of is that Roger is somehow caching stuff from previous crawls? According to the crawl report these duplicates were discovered '1 day ago' but that simply doesn't make sense. It's not a matter of messing up one or two pages on my part either; we made this site to be dynamically generated, and all of the SEO stuff (canonical, etc.) is applied to every single page regardless of what's on it. If anyone can give some insight I'd appreciate it!
Moz Pro | | icecarats0 -
Very confused on site.com/ or not using a /
I'm wanting to put the rel="canonical" tag on my homepage but I'm not sure which to use? How would you know what to use and always links to, http://www.site.com or http://www.site.com**/** Personally I never knew there was a difference until I used the seomoz tool and I wasn't using the tag.
Moz Pro | | GYMSN0 -
Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content. To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g. http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist. What can we do to remove these error messages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | TJSSEO1 -
Can overly dynamic URLs be overcome with canonical meta tags?
I tried searching for questions regarding dynamic URLs and canonical tags, but I couldn't find anything s hopefully this hasn't been covered. There are a large number of overly dynamic URLs reported in our site crawl (>7,000). I haven't looked at each of these, but most of these either have a canonical meta tag or have are indicated as FOLLOW, NO INDEX pages. Will these be enough to overcome any negative SEO impact that may come from overly dynamic URLs? We are down to almost 0 critical errors and this is now the biggest problem reported by the site crawl after too many on page links.
Moz Pro | | afmaury0