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?
![http://i.imgur.com/5BYcV.jpg[/IMG][/URL]](http://i.imgur.com/5BYcV.jpg%5B/IMG%5D%5B/URL%5D){kind=link}
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
-
301 and rel=canonical AGAINNNN
Trying to understand rel=canonical if you have proper 301 redirects (redirects to the canonical URl) for example when migrating from a HTTP to HTTPS environment why would you also opt to add a rel=cannonical tag on the same pages. What effect does this have on SERP rankings or is it ok to have 301 redirects and rel=canonicalon the same page? Anyone?
Moz Pro | | InternetRep0 -
Is it important to have a Rel-Canonical tag on every webpage?
Our website just had its first crawl test and about 90% of the pages have the tag.
Moz Pro | | FastHandDryer0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
Canonical URLs and Duplicate Page Content
My website (doctor directory) is getting a lot of duplicate page content & duplicate page title warnings from SEOmoz. The pages that are getting the warnings are doctors profiles which can be accessed at three different URLs. Problem is this should be handled by the canonical tag on the pages. So example below, all three open the same page: https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/ https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/gkv https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/pkv Here's our canonical tag (on line 34): rel="canonical" href="http://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh" /> So why is SEO moz crawling the page? We are getting hundreds of errors from this - and yet Google doesn't have any of the duplicate URLs indexed...
Moz Pro | | thomashillard0 -
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 -
I have another Duplicate page content Question to ask.Why does my blog tags come up as duplicates when my page gets crawled,how do I fix it?
I have a blog linked to my web page.& when rogerbot crawls my website it considers tags for my blog pages duplicate content.is there any way I can fix this? Thanks for your advice.
Moz Pro | | PCTechGuy20120 -
Some questions on Canonical tag AND 301 redirect
Hi everyone, I'm new here - always loved SEOMoz and glad to be part of the Pro community now. I have 2 questions regarding the Canonical URL tag. Some background info: We used to run an OsCommerce store, and recently migrated to Magento. In doing so, we right away created 301 redirects of the old category pages (OsCommerce) to the new category pages (Magento) via the Magento admin. Example: www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
301 redicrected to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html In Magento admin, we have enabled the Canonical tag for all product and category pages. Here's how Magento sets up the Canonical tag: The URL of interest which we want to rank is:
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html However Magento sets up the canonical tag on this page to point to:
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html When using the SEOMoz On Page Report Card, it pick this up as an error because the Canonical tag is pointing to a different URL. However, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the URL being pointed to
www.example.com/old-widget-category.html
has a 301 redirect to
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html
which is the URL we wan to rank. So because we set up a 301 redirect of the old-page to the new-page, on the new-page the canonical tag points to the old-page. Question 1)
What are you opinions on this? Do you think this method of setting up the Canonical tag is acceptable? Second question... We use pagination for category pages, so if we have 50 products in one category, we would have 5 pages of 10 products. The URL's would be: www.example.com/new-widget-category.html (which is the SAME as ?p=1)
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=1
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=2
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=3
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=4
www.example.com/new-widget-category.html?p=5 Now ALL the URLs above have the canonical tag set as:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/new-widget-category" /> However, the content of each page (page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is different because different products are displayed. So far most what I read regarding the Canonical tag is that it is used for pages that have the same content but different URLs. I would hope that Google would combine the content of all 5 pages and view the result as a single URL www.example.com/new-widget-category Question 2) Is using the canonical tag appropriate in the case described above? Thanks !0 -
Blogger Duplicate Content? and Canonical Tag
Hello: I previously asked this question, but I would love to get more perspectives on this issue. In Blogger, there is an archive page and label(s) page(s) created for each main post. Firstly, does Google, esp. considering Blogger is their product, possibly see the archive and tag pages created in addition to the main post as partial duplicate content? The other dilemma is that each of these instances - main post, archive, label(s) - claim to be the canonical. Does anyone have any insight or experience with this issue and Blogger and how Google is treating the partial duplicates and the canonical claims to the same content (even though the archives and label pages are partial?) I do not see anything in Blogger settings that allows altering these settings - in fact, the only choices in Blogger settings are 'Email Posting' and 'Permissions' (could it be that I cannot see the other setting options because I am a guest and not the blog owner?) Thanks so much everyone! PS - I was not able to add the blog as a campaign in SEOmoz Pro, which in and of itself is odd - and which I've never seen before - could this be part of the issue? Are Blogger free blogs not able to be crawled for some reason via SEOmoz Pro?
Moz Pro | | holdtheonion0