Rel=canonical Notice
-
In the Crawl Diagnostics report we see there 314 Rel Canonical notices. We use the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and noticed that the URL is the exact same as the Tag value. When looking into the issue more, I see that the rel canonical tag is pointing to the same page as itself. For example, on the www.domain.com/blog/ page, there is a link rel="canonical" href="/blog/".
- Is this an issue that needs to be fixed?
- How can it be fixed?
- Will this cause any potential ranking issues?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
-
Ah, yes. Since the tag just "represents" the URL that should be used for the content, it doesn't produce an endless loop. Redirects (301 or 302) produce loops from time to time, but that is another issue. Good question to ask and good that you are looking at everything to make sure your site is healthy.
-
Thank you very much for your help. I just thought it was odd to have a rel canonical tag that pointed to itself. Seems like it would be an endless loop. Great to hear that this is not a concern and can be disregarded.
-
Hello!
It sounds like there are a few questions here.
First, let me clarify that the 314 Rel Canonical notices are just that - notices. They are there to let you know the canonical link elements are present and also the tag value or where they point to.
Second, in most cases, the tag values match the page URL. Canonical link elements are used to identify the URL search engines should use for the page no matter how the URL looks.
I don't think you have any issues that need to be fixed as long as you've confirmed the canonical link element tag values match the page you are reviewing. You shouldn't see any ranking issues.
Edit: Looks like Jesse chimed in as I was typing up a response. What he has said is correct, you should be fine :).
-
Nope, doesn't need to be fixed. There's nothing wrong with this practice, especially for a Wordpress site (imo).
The notices that moz tools are giving you are just that - to make you aware that those canonical tags exist. They aren't warnings or errors, just notices to draw your attention to canonicals in case you ever wanted to look into them or ensure they were correct.
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 URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
Duplicate Content even when Canonical is used
Hi Everyone, Our website uses the Magento platform which is notorious for creating duplicate content. I tried to make sure that all the duplicate content it creates should be "canonicalized" to the correct page. While looking through the moz Page Diagnostics I see that I have 1003(!) pages of duplicate content. When I downloaded the csv I saw that over 95% of them had a canonical url. Does that mean there is really no issue but moz analytics is still reading it as duplicate content and titles? Is there an issue with them being canonicals as opposed to being redirected? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | EcomLkwd1 -
Rel=canonical "redirects" to double links
Our devs have set up rel=canonical on our website. First they used relative links href="/dir1/dir2/dir3" for the page http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/?detail1=1?detail2=2 meaning that it will redirect to http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3, but no luck, the MOZ dashboard showed the tag value to be http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir1/dir2/dir3, then we have decided to rewrite the code, and now the canonical to http://wwwmysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/?detail1=1?detail2=2 looks like href="http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/" but the tag on MOZ looks like http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3http://www.mysite.com/dir1/dir2/dir3. So what is the problem? I really got a problem or MOZ does? The code on website looks exactly like href="http://www.aaa.com/en/bbb/ccc/vvv/nnn/" rel="canonical" /> for the page http://www.aaa.com/en/bbb/ccc/vvv/nnn/
Moz Pro | | apartmentGin0 -
How can I see the URL's affected in Seomoz Crawl when Notices increase
Hi, When Seomoz crawled my site, my notices increased by 255. How can I only these affected urls ? thanks Sarah
Moz Pro | | SarahCollins0 -
Does Rogerbot recognize rel="alternate" hreflang="x"?
Rogerbot just completed its first crawl and is reporting all kinds of duplicate content - both page content and meta title/description. The pages it is calling duplicate are used with rel="alternate" hreflang="x", but are still being labeled as dupes. The title and descriptions are usually exactly the same, so I am working on getting at least those translated into different languages. I think its getting tripped up because the product page its crawling are only in English, but the chrome of the site is in the translated languages. The URLs look like so: Original: site.com/product Detected duplicates: site.com/fr/product, site.com/de/product, site.com/zh-hans/product
Moz Pro | | sedwards0 -
Canonical URLs and Duplicate Page Content
My website (doctor directory) is getting a lot of duplicate page content & duplicate page title warnings from SEOmoz. The pages that are getting the warnings are doctors profiles which can be accessed at three different URLs. Problem is this should be handled by the canonical tag on the pages. So example below, all three open the same page: https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/ https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/gkv https://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh/pkv Here's our canonical tag (on line 34): rel="canonical" href="http://www.arzttermine.de/arzt/dr-sara-danesh" /> So why is SEO moz crawling the page? We are getting hundreds of errors from this - and yet Google doesn't have any of the duplicate URLs indexed...
Moz Pro | | thomashillard0 -
Canonical link on canonical url
This might seem a bit of an odd one, but we seem to be going around in circles on this when using the on page optimizer tool. We have an ecommerce site (magento) which by default is putting a canonical link in the header on every product page. For example; www.example.com/product1.html has the But when we run the on page optimiser tool, we're losing points on the critical section for not having canonical set correctly. If we remove the tag, we get the tick and the a grade, but then further down the report we lose a tick for not using canonical links. What are we missing here?
Moz Pro | | andyjsi0 -
Is anyone noticing a difference between Google position when you view ten and when you view a hundred results per page?
We have noticed a gap as large as 30 places when using UK Google. Interested in whether other people are seeing this and if anyone can offer an explaination. Thanks Turkey
Moz Pro | | Turkey0