Rel canonical confusion
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
Rel=canonical and redirect on same page
Hi Guys, Am I going slightly mad but why would you want to have a redirect and a canonical redirecting back to the same page. For Instance https://handletrade.co.uk/pull-handles/pull-handles-zcs-range/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/?tag=Dia.&page=2 and in the source code:- <link href="<a class="attribute-value">https://handletrade.co.uk/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/</a>" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" /> Perfect! exactly what it is intended to do. But then this page is 301 redirected tohttps://handletrade.co.uk/pull-handles/pull-handles-zcs-range/d'-pull-handle-19mm-dia.-19-x-150mm-ss/ The site is built in open cart and I think it's the SEO plugin that needs tweaking. Could this cause poor SERP visibility? This is happening across the whole site. Surely the canonical should just point to the proper page and then there is no need for an additional bounce.
Technical SEO | | nezona1 -
The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags
Hey guys, My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution... My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform. I use Yoast SEO plugin. The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example. The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags: I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically. Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically. Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed." Problem: Am I doing this the way it should be done? I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page). One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder. Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated. 🙂 Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.
Technical SEO | | sidstar0 -
Canonical solution for query strings?
Greetings, The Hotel company where I'm employed uses query strings in it's url's to track customers. The query strings are integrated into our property management system, and they help identify who we need to pay commissions to, so they aren't going anywhere. While I understand that session variables could have been a better solution, I sort of inherited this problem. The issue I'm running into is that my Webmaster tools picks up these query strings as actual url's. So for instance: www.url.com/index.php?P_SOURCE=WBFQ Seems like a duplicate page of my root, and like wise for all my other pages that use our booking widget. So, Is there a canonical solution to this issue? or would 301/302's be the only solution. Also, we may have 10 different but specific query strings to put into our urls. Would the 301/302 approach cause any server issues for say 10 pages? So 10 pages x 10 access codes = a lot of redirects. Thanks in advance, Cyril
Technical SEO | | Nola5040 -
Home page canonical issues
I think I’ve got a canonical issue with a client’s site that I’m having problems with I’ve noticed in their analytics that they receive traffic from themselves. I’ve used ‘ rel canonical’ throughout the site to avoid any dup issues and I have 301’ed every other variation of the home page I can think of. I don’t have full access to the back end of the host to control any of the iis as it’s an asp site. They seem to be getting traffic from their site under the URL of, example.com I’ve 301 redirected www.example.com/home.asp www.example.com/default.asp www.example.com/index.asp to www.example.com And 'rel canonical' the home page to www.example.com but still seem to be having the same problem any ideas? Thanks
Technical SEO | | FarkyRafiq0 -
Am I Doing this Canonical Right?
Hi,I admit to new to the Mod Rewrite.Here is my mod rewrite in my .htaccess# Begin non-www page protection # <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | Force7
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> # End non-www page protection #If I have my home page set toI really want the canonical to be www.domain.com no trailing slashDid I create a confllict, and if so, how should I change it?0 -
Rel=canonical and Google analytics referrals
Hello guys, If I put (rel=can) from site1.com/page1 to site2.com/page1, will site2.com see in his Google Analytics that people are coming from site1.com in the referrals section or somewhere else? I can't find anything on the web about that. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | YST0 -
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