Rel canonical confusion
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I have 172 pages on my site coming up as having a rel canoncial tag
This is not something I've added myself so I think it must either be part of wordpress or part of a plug in I'm using . ALL in One SEO?
They have come up as blue warning so not sure if it's a big deal, or what i need to do to fix it.
Thanks
Kate
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Having rel=canonical is recommended for all pages of your website, even if it's the original version. It's because for example if your url is:
and you have that set as canonical on the page, and someone references to your page as
http://domain.com/url?ref=feed
The canonical URL will still be http://domain.com/url and hence won't count as duplicate pages.
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Hi Neil
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply. And for checking that everything is working fine re rel canonical thingies on my site.
I really appreciate it - award yourself 20 good deed points for today.
Best wishes,
Kate -
Hi Kate - this is nothing to worry about.
Rel Canonicals are generally shown on the SEOmoz PRO dashboard as an alert/heads up, rather than a direct warning. There is, of course, potential for real damage if they're configured incorrectly, but in your case it appears the Wordpress SEO plugin you're using is doing fine.
Your canonical URLs are showing as what you most likely would expect and want them to be, the post permalinks or the category URLs.
I experimented and changed some of the letters in the URLs to uppercase, to check for problems. Whilst the URLs still resolved with uppercase characters and didn't 301 redirect to lowercase (which would generally considered best practice), the Rel canonical URLs set remained the lowercase version even with mixed case in the browser bar - this is, again, exactly how you would want it to behave.
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