Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

[projectassistant]

I have encountered problems regarding rel canonical. When I ran  On-Page Report Card it says

**Error: **

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

Canonical URL: "http://www.sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/"

Explanation: 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. Recommendation We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL.

NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply."

I just don't know how to fix this. I am using Wordpress SEO by Yoast but I haven't change any settings regarding rel canonical. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Anthony,

Just checking in! Are you still having issues or were you able to resolve this? More than happy to help if you still need it.

Cyrus

[TomRayner]

The issue here might be because of how your site is seen by Google.  After visiting the site, you can see that the www. part of the URL is removed across the site, so you're only left with sourcedental.create etc etc.

That's fine, but the example you gave above said that the canonical URL, what is defined as the original URL and the one that Google should rank, contains a www.  This is inconsistent with that is happening with your site.  Your canonical should match the site and not include the www.

Having said that, this shouldn't cause a major issue because, even if Google tried to index the www. version as per the canonical's directive, it 301 redirects to the non www. version anyway.

What's also confusing is that, having looked at your source code, your canonical URL is denominated as http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/, so it's actually set up properly.

If your canonical URL is set up to be http://sourcedental.createmyid.net/teeth-whitening/ in the Yoast plugin, then I'd say the problem lies more with the SEOMoz tool rather than your site.  In which case, just ignore it as everything seems to be working as intended, from what I can see.