On-Page Report Card, rel canonical
-
My site has the rel canonical tags set up for it. The developers say that it is set up correctly. Looking at the source code myself, it looks (to my untutored eyes) to be set up correctly. However, on the On Page Report Card for every page I have checked, it says that it doesn't point to the right page. I'd really like to change all my 'B's to 'A's, but I simply can't see what the issue is.
-
Thanks Ryan. So apparently it is OK to have relative links, as long as they are done correctly. My developers insist that they HAVE done them correctly, but SEOmoz flags it anyway because for all it knows, the base link may not have been set to the right location. I'm going to see if I can get the URLs changed to absolute.
-
It's in the code so your developer would have to do it, from Google's Guide:
Can the link be relative or absolute?
The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
-
Hey James,
Not sure exactly how your site is organized but it seems like you should be able to resolve the issue using 301 direction instead of rel canonicals.
Sameer
-
1. I'm not sure how I would do that, so I would have to get the developers to do it.
2. I'm not sure if that would fix the issue
3. While it would be nice to have 'A's showing for the report cards, it isn't really essential if there isn't really a problem - and if this IS what is causing us to get dinged I'm not sure that it is truly a problem on my site, or just a limitation in the 'report card'.
-
Trying making the absolute URL, i.e. "http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons" as your href instead of "/category/9-Irons" in the rel="canonical" link tag.
-
Let's say that I sell golfing supplies and have the category "9-Irons". On that category page, the source code would say:
<link rel="canonical" href="[/category/9-Irons](view-source:http://www.breakoutbras.com/category/Nursing-Bras)" /> If I enter the keyword "9 Irons" into SEOmoz, and put the URL as: http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons I get dinged for having the wrong canonical reference.
-
Hi James. Lets say you have 15 pages that are the canonical pages and the 35 pages that are variations (alphabetically sorted, price sorted, whatnot). If those non-canonical 35 pages are being graded they're not going to have a rel=canonical that lines up because they're not the canonical page. The on page report card is only looking to match the URL you entered into the SEOmoz system and the tag that you have on your page. Is that what's happening in your situation?
I doubt it, but just in case you missed it, the explanation from On Page Report Card: If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.
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
-
Duplicate page titles for blog snippets pages
I can't figure the answer to this issue, on my blog I have a number of pages which each show snippets and an image for each blog entry, these are called /recent-weddings/page/1 /2 /3 and so on. I'm getting duplicate page titles for these but can't find anywhere on Wordpress to set a unique title for them. So http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/2/ has the same title as http://www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/recent-weddings/…/3/
Technical SEO | | simonatkinsphoto0 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Rel=canonical overkill on duplicate content?
Our site has many different health centers - many of which contain duplicate content since there is topic crossover between health centers. I am using rel canonical to deal with this. My question is this: Is there a tipping point for duplicate content where Google might begin to penalize a site even if it has the rel canonical tags in place on cloned content? As an extreme example, a site could have 10 pieces of original content, but could then clone and organize this content in 5 different directories across the site each with a new url. This would ultimately result in the site having more "cloned" content than original content. Is this at all problematic even if the rel canonical is in place on all cloned content? Thanks in advance for any replies. Eric
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
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 -
Page crawling is only seeing a portion of the pages. Any Advice?
last couple of page crawls have returned 14 out of 35 pages. Is there any suggestions I can take.
Technical SEO | | cubetech0 -
Rel canonical = can it hurt your SEO
I have a site that has been developed to default to the non-www version. However each page has a rel canonical to the non-www version too. Could having this in place on all pages hurt the site in terms of search engines? thanks Steve
Technical SEO | | stevecounsell0 -
Home Page Canonical Question
I have an online store through hosting service Volusion. I have asked them about this and was told that this is normal. I would like to confirm this with you guys because I'm not convinced of the quality of their customer service and I'm not an expert. When I check Analytics the landing page that is visited most often is www....../default.asp and the second most visited is www........./ . These are, of course, both my home page. Volusion has radio button that allows the admin to "enable canonical links", which I have enabled, and they told me that it is normal to see this on google analytics regardless. When I type in either of those addreses, the homepage comes up as the address that I typed. In other words it doesn't redirect so that it is always the same. Am I right to be concerned about this?
Technical SEO | | berglin0