Rel Canonical question

[Shaaps]

Hi:

I got a report indication 17 rel canonical notices. What does this mean in simple language and how do i go about fixing things?

[Shaaps]

Thanks guys!

[KeriMorgret]

Also, it's just a notice, not a warning or error. More of a "hey, this is here and make sure everything looks OK" type of thing.

[LCNetwork]

Did you not add these yourself? It is a single line of code on the pages of your site:

If the rel=canonical is exactly the same as the URL of the page it is one then don't panic everything is fine :). If the URL in the rel=canonical tag is different than the URL of the page it is on, you may need to change it. Rel=canonical means, in as simple language as I can put it:

Google, Bing, or Whoever shows up to your page. Rel=canonical says,"Hey! Google, Bing, or Whoever! I'd prefer it if you would look at this other page as the "definitive" version of this content." And then rel=canonical points the search engine to the other page. After this, the non-"canonical" page should drop out of the search results.

This is useful when:

1. You have two pages with very similar or duplicate content that you want users to be able to navigate to, but that you don't want Google to see as duplicate (they get very angry about that now). These could be on one domain, or on two different website that you run.

2. You have URLs that are dynamically generated, or have a lot of query strings (e.g., ?shoes=red), and you don't want Google to think that you are duplicating content.

3. Someone else takes your content and tries to pass it off as their own.

Many people (myself included) feel that you should have "self-serving" rel=canonical on every page of your site, where the URL is the same as the page it is on. This helps with number 3, since you are automatically telling Google "Hey, THIS is the definitive version" before anyone else has the chance to.

If the rel=canonical tags are pointing to pages that they shouldn't be pointing to, you just need to delete that one line of code.