Canonical tag in the Michael Torbert SEO plugin
-
I am confused about a canonical tag that appears in the header section of a site that uses the WordPress All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbert. That is a very popular one.
It says,
I thought that telling Google that a page is canonical means "Don't index this one, it is not the primary page." But in fact, this is the primary page because when you go to www.xquisitevents.com it redirects to xquisitevents.com.
Is this done properly or not?
Ditto for all the other pages, i.e. xquisitevents.com/about-us has a canonical tag in the wordpress plugin, etc.
Which is the real primary page? And does the primary page correctly have the canonical tag in the plugin?
-
I think your point is valid here. I think we need to break down canonical a bit for this one to make sense. The canonical tag is not a redirect. It is a suggestion, not a directive. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
In this case you are correct. The site owner is telling Google that he wants the www version to be displayed in Google SERPs. And if you go and search for xquisite events you will find that the first several results are using the www just like he requested. What is strange here is that the site owner has a 301 redirect pointing the www to the non. It seems to me that the site owner accidentally used the canonical on the wrong page. Instead of placing it on the pages he did not want to be primarily indexed he did the inverse.
Based on his redirects his REAL primary pages are non www but his canonical usage is suggesting the opposite. Hope this helps.
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
-
Display ads and SEO
I have a section(no. of webpages with content) on my site with display ads. The site is mainly for UK visitors. I want to show ads to UK visitors but not US visitors. Rest of the content will be the same for UK and US. There will just be 1 page with same UrL for US and UK. Hence, no href lang tags are being used.
Technical SEO | | Kohliharleen
Is there any correlation between display ads and SEO? Would not showing ads in US cause any issues for bots or do bots consider display ads and SEO as two completey different aspects. Asking as Google bot crawls from the US.1 -
Express js and SEO?
Hi fellow Mozzers, I have been tasked with providing some SEO recommendations for a website that is to be built using express.js and Angular. I wondered whether anyone has had any experience in such a framework? On checking a website built in this and viewing as a GoogleBot etc using the following tools it appears as though most of the content is invisible: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php http://www.browseo.net/ Obviously this is a huge issue and wonder if there are any workarounds, or reccomendations to assist (even if means moving away from this - would love to hear about it)
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing2 -
Product Tags
Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, these are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price (they created pages but I have canonical links in them so that is a non-issue). Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Canonical Question
Can someone please help me with a question, I am learning about Canonical URls at the moment and have had some errors come up, it is saying ```![Priority 1](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/p1.png)This page has multiple rel=canonical tags.Line 9 Best Practice[![](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/dropbox.png)](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/res/2.view.htm#)![Help](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/help.png)Search engine behavior is unpredictable when a page has multiple canonical tags. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate RSS Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate Atom Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/atom/" /><link rel="pingback" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/xmlrpc.php" />That canonical link to Feed? should that be there, I know the Plugin has done this but I am lost to what should be there, I have no duplicate pages as far as I am aware than needs a canonical URL ??Thanks ``` >
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Canonical Issue?
Hi, I was using the On Page Report Card Tool here on SEOMOZ for the following page: http://www.priceline.com/eventi-a-kimpton-hotel-new-york-city-new-york-ny-1614979-hd.hotel-reviews-hotel-guides and it claims there is a canonical issue or improper use of it. I looked at the element and it seems to be fine: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.priceline.com/eventi-a-kimpton-hotel-new-york-city-new-york-ny-1614979-hd.hotel-reviews-hotel-guides" /> Can you spot the issue and how it would be fixed? Thanks. Eddy
Technical SEO | | workathomecareers0 -
Yoast WP SEO Plugin: Duplicate Title / Description For Pagination
Hello, I just have installed on YAOST WP SEO plugin on my blog to optimize and get better results, as I was using All in one seo Plugin before. On Tuesday SEOMOZ crawler has been updated my site report and I found several errors with my site related to duplicate meta title / description. Home Page Pagination, Categories/archive pagination and tags pagination bring the same meta title and description. I tried several methods to get the required result but unfortunately nothing helped. I used %%pagenumber%% and %%page%% etc. Any help will be highly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
Call tracking and Local SEO
I am the in house SEO/Web for a multi-branch/multi-state company and I am having a hard time tracking the amount of calls that are coming off of our site to the many branches. I am wondering if there are any tips for use call tracking numbers without negatively impacting my local SEO results? In one of the webinars they touched on image replacement and also that it some situations it might be out to just use the tracking numbers.
Technical SEO | | mmaes0