Why does Rel Canonical show up as a notice?
-
In the crawl diagnostics screen "Rel Canonical" shows up as a notice for every page that has a rel="canonical" meta tag in it. Why is this the case?
Shouldn't every page have a canonical tag on it to show the absolute URL to the content? Wouldn't a better notice be to display pages that do not have a canonical tag instead?
I could be wrong but that would make more sense to me. (In fact.. let's be honest here.. I probably am wrong.. but I'd like someone to explain it if they could.)
Thanks
-
The ability to hide various notices and warnings is something a lot of our users have requested - we're working on it!
-
It would also be nice to have an optIon to turn off the notices for pages that are using the canonical tag. This is helpful for those of us that try to use the crawl diagnostics page as another tool to find potential on page problems. I would rather hide the fact that a page has a canonical tag and show me the ones that don't. That allows me to have a fairly clear picture of things that need to be fixed on the site.
-
Irving is correct - we add it as a notice because it's a good thing to keep track of, and because some people do incorrectly implement this tag, which causes problems. I'll pass your suggestion for also tracking non-canonical pages on to our Product team. Thanks!
-
I have seen so many people use the canonical tag incorrectly, that it can certainly help troubleshoot site issues by being able to download a list of canonical tags. I do agree on your premise though and untagged pages can be equally problematic and the crawler should allow us to see which pages are not tagged.
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 to choose the best canonical URL
In a duplicate content situation, and assuming that both rel=canonical and a 301 redirect pass link equity (I know there is still some speculation on this), how should you choose the "best" version of the URL to establish as the redirect target or authoritative URL? For example, we have a series of duplicate pages on our site. Typically we choose the "cleanest" or shortest non-trailing-slash version of the URL as the canonical, but what if those pages are already established and have varying page authority/backlink profiles? The URLs are: example.com/stores/locate/index?parameters=tags - PA = 54, Inbound Links = 259 example.com/stores/locate/index - PA = 60, Inbound Links = 302 example.com/stores/ - This is the version that currently ranks. PA = 42, Inbound Links = 3 example.com/stores - PA = 40, Inbound Links = 8 This might not really even matter, but in the interests of conserving as much SEO value as possible, which would you choose as either the 301 redirect target and/or the canonical version? My gut is to go with the URL that's already ranking (example.com/stores/) but curious if PA, backlinks, and trailing slashes should be considered also. We of course would not 301 the URL with the tracking parameters. 🙂 Thanks for your help!
Moz Pro | | Critical_Mass0 -
Webmaster Tools shows mystery errors that Moz does not
One of my campaigns is doing great in the sense that the website has been running fault free for a few months now. Great, of course! But... in Google Webmaster Tools errors keep coming in showing older media documents and pages. And it does not say where they are from. Probably this is more a Google question, but I thought I'd try to find some answers here first. I would appreciate any suggestions and help. Monique
Moz Pro | | MarketingEnergy0 -
Rel=canonical Notice
In the Crawl Diagnostics report we see there 314 Rel Canonical notices. We use the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and noticed that the URL is the exact same as the Tag value. When looking into the issue more, I see that the rel canonical tag is pointing to the same page as itself. For example, on the www.domain.com/blog/ page, there is a link rel="canonical" href="/blog/". Is this an issue that needs to be fixed? How can it be fixed? Will this cause any potential ranking issues? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Moz Pro | | Prager0 -
Keyword Rankings nos showing up?
My crawl was on Thursday and I am still not seeing any keyword rankings? This is happening to two different campaigns I have running. Is there something I need to do or is there something going on with the tool? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | hottwigg0 -
In Site Explorer My Blog.URL.com Shows "No Data Available for this URL"
Why when I use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org and I'm researching our Blog.URL.com's does the tool say "No Data Available for this URL"? Example: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=blog.centurypayments.com
Moz Pro | | cfield_splashmedia.com0 -
Several DA 70+ websites linked to me, not showing in OSE
Like the title says, about 3 weeks ago several websites linked to me. Those websites have very high and probably 100% of this board has heard of them. I'm wondering how long it takes for OSE to recognize these links, and if my website's DA and mozTrust will increase as a result?
Moz Pro | | CHEATERS0 -
Why are inbound links not showing up?
I'm new to SEOmoz but have a question regarding inbound links that I don't see posted in the forum. In order to become more familiar with SEOmoz tools, I've been checking out sites that friends and family members have created as practice. Things have been going really smooth until I came across a 2+ year old page that should have included an inbound link from wsj.com but said link is not appearing in OSE for this page. Background: A friend of mine has a (basically) defunct blog that had a pretty well trafficked posting in 2009. However, when I use OSE to check out both the domain and page inbound links, I don't see the aforementioned inbound link from wsj.com. Why is that? Or, it's insanely late - am I missing something? Friend's blog posting: http://bcclist.com/2009/04/21/craigslist-killer-megan-philipcom-removed/ WSJ posting with a link to my friend's blog (4th paragraph...anchor text = "taken down"): http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/21/who-is-megan-mcallister/ No rush. Again, I'm doing this as practice and being new to the site, I figure I'm overlooking something. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ICM0 -
Canonical issue in open site explorer
When I look at my back links in OSE, I see two landing pages on my site that are really the same page. www.mysite.com/ and www.mysite.com/(affiliate code here) These show different inbound link characteristics and page authority. The page in question has a rel=canonical tag. Am I doing something wrong?
Moz Pro | | EugeneF0