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
-
Canonical tag refers to itself (???)
Greetings Mozzers. I have seen a couple of pages that use canonical tags in a peculiar way, and I wanted to know if this way of using the tags was correct, harmless or dangerous: What I've seen is that on some pages like: www.example.com/page1 There's a canonical tag in the header that looks like this link href="http://ww.example.com/page1" rel="canonical" It looks as though the tag is "redirecting to itself", this seems useless (at least to me). Is there a case where this is actually a recommended practice? Will using the canonical tag in this way "hurt" the page's ranking potential? Cheers Jorge
Technical SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
What is the best way to use canonical tag
Hi, i have been researching this since yesterday and have looked at this subject many times before but still cannot get my head around it. i done a report on my site which was very useful, i used http://www.juxseo.com for my site www.in2town.co.uk and it brought me some useful information but part of that info was it was telling me that i should have on my home page a canonical tag which would improve my seo. Now i am using sh404sef for my friendly urls and i am using joomla 3.0 and when i approached the makers of the sh404sef to ask about the tag they said i would need to be careful of using it as it could damage my site and my rankings. i have read lots of information but still do not have a clear understanding behind it. can anyone please explain the best way to use this and should i be using where i may have some sort of duplicate page, any help to understand this would be great.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Joomla Title Help - Plugin?
I am currently working on a site in Joomla (2.5) and continue to run across issues with titles. Currently, the site is set to display the page title just over the content. Turning this off really is not an option, as it is necessary to keep these titles as part of the content. Right now, my page titles are not well optimized. What I would like to have is a separate meta title used for SEO purposes, similar to what a plugin like Yoast would do in WordPress - where there is a name for a page (often used in content as well), but a meta title that is used by Google. Hope that makes sense. If anyone knows of a plugin that may be helpful, that would be great. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DeliaAssociates0 -
SEO Audit - Panda
I am looking for a reputable SEO company to help diagnose Panda issues. I am very familiar with SEO and lead an in-house team so I need more than a basic audit. e.g You need unique content
Technical SEO | | WEB-IRS
e.g. You need to create quality content I am looking for someone with a technical mind to help diagnose. Please reach if you have someone in mind.0 -
Rel=Canonical, WWW vs non WWW and SEO
Okay so I'm a bit of a loss here. For what ever reason just about every single Wordpress site I has will turn www.mysite.com into mysite.com in the browser bar. I assume this is the rel=canonical tag at work, there are no 301s on my site. When I use the Open Site Explorer and type in www.mysite.com it shows a domain authority of around 40 and a few hundred backlinks... and then I get the message. Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to XXXXXX. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>? So if I click to see this data instead I have less than half of that domain authority and about 2 backlinks. *** Does this make a difference SEO wise? Should my non WWW be redirecting to my WWW instead because that's where the domain authority and backlinks are? Why am I getting two different domain authority and backlink counts if they are essentially the same? Or am I wrong and all that link juice and authority passes just the same?
Technical SEO | | twilightofidols0 -
How to start more deep seo.
Okay, lets say that I already fixed all my technical seo stuff. All my crawl errors and warnings are gone. Now I really want to start seo so I have a few questions. 1. I know I should work based on a page and not on a domain, so it means I should choose which keyword to optimize each page for? only one keyword per page? or it might be more? 2. Some keywords are very competitive for me, example for my site www.theprinterdepo.com, the best keyword to rank would be printers, but it would take years a beginner to do that, what should I do? 3. If highly competitive keywords are not an option, which keywords shuold I use? the ones that have more global monthly searches? Thanks
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Using a canonical tag to eliminate ID variables?
My research on seomoz has resulted in conflicting ideas regarding the canonical tag. One article says avoid it, the other says embrace it. We have fixed a majority of our architecture problems using redirects for duplicate content, however, when we send out newsletters we still have these pesky tracking ids. I figured out how to remove them from analytics, but am unsure of how this affects our SEO. An example of one of our links is: https://www.quicklearn.com/transcript/?utm_source=news101011&utm_medium=e&utm_campaign=newclass&nlid=news101011&UID=2287 The original url being www.quicklearn.com/transcript/ the custom (non-Google) variables being nlid and uid. Is this a problem? Do I need rel cononical tags on each and every page?
Technical SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Canonical on ecommerce site
I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic, is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Gordian0