Campaign Issue: Rel Canonical - Does this mean it should be "on" or "off?"

[mrbradleyferguson]

Hello, somewhat new to the finer details of SEO - I know what canonical tags are, but I am confused by how SEOmoz identifies the issue in campaigns.

I run a site on a wordpress foundation, and I have turned on the option for "canonical URLs" in the All in one SEO plugin. I did this because in all cases, our content is original and not duplicated from elsewhere.

SEOmoz has identified every one of my pages with this issue, but the explanation of the status simply states that canonical tags "indicate to search engines which URL should be seen as the original."

So, it seems to me that if I turn this OFF on my site, I turn off the notice from SEOmoz, but do not have canonical tags on my site.

Which way should I be doing this?

THANK YOU.

[mrbradleyferguson]

Thank you both for your answers. Much appreciated.

[KeriMorgret]

This is a notice, not an error or a warning. It's basically saying "hey, people can often screw this up, take a look and make sure that everything looks OK to you".

[riplash]

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 the Wordpress SEO plugin you're using is probably doing just fine.

As long as your canonical URLs are what you want them to be, i.e. the relevant post permalinks or category URLs, you're golden.