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 -
301 Redirect & Canonical Tags
If I have URL A and need to 301 Redirect to URL B but want to have a canonical tag on URL B pointing to URL A Would this be considered cloaking? My server which runs .net 3.5 does not allow me to do URL re-writes.
Moz Pro | | IMM0 -
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 -
I have a Rel Canonical "notice" in my Crawl Diagnostics report. I'm presuming that means that the spider has detected a rel canonical tag and it is working as opposed to warning about an issue, is this correct?
I know this seems like a really dumb question but the site I'm working on is a BigCommerce one and I've been concerned about canonicalisation issues prior to receiving this report (I'm a SEOmoz pro newbie also!) and I just want to be clear I am reading this notice correctly. I presume this means that the site crawl has detected the rel canonical tag on these pages and it is working correctly. Is this correct?? Any input is much appreciated. Thanks
Moz Pro | | seanpearse0 -
Why aren't canonical tags reducing duplicate page title/content?
We have canonical tags set up for a feature page on one of our sites. This site has an image gallery controlled by javascript. To aid the user experience the image can also be specified by a URL parameter (the javascript also uses this URL to fetch the images). The SEOMoz report complains that the links to these images have duplicate page titles and content. To try and combat this we set canonical tags to point only to the original page, without the slideshow parameter. e.g. http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=1 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ http://www.example.com/feature-page/?slideshow=2 -> canonical tag set to http://www.example.com/feature-page/ The latest SEOMoz report has come back and the errors still exist. What can we do to remove these error messages? Thanks
Moz Pro | | TJSSEO1 -
Will canonical tag get rid of duplicate page title errors?
I have a directory on my website, paginated in groups of 10. On page 2 of the results, the title tag is the same as the first page, as it is on the 3rd page and so on. This is giving me duplicate page title errors. If i use rel=canonical tags on the subsequent pages and href the first page of my results, will my duplicate page title warnings go away? thanks.
Moz Pro | | fourthdimensioninc0 -
Rel-canonical tag confusion
I had our web development company implement the rel-canonical tag on all pages of our website to get rid of the duplicate content months ago. However, when I use the On Page optimizer tool (in previous version) it would tell me I'm not using the rel-canonical tag correctly on the page I was grading and when I untagged use rel-canonical tag in our CMS (which was pointing to the correct page) my grade would go to an A. Now with the new version it says I'm using it wrong either way, when I have the tag used in my CMS and everything else is good I have a B, but one I click to not use Rel-canonical tag I have a C. Both ways it shows up in On-page tool without a check in Apprpriate Use of Rel Canonical. I've attached pictures. In C version it says - Canonical URL "/info/solutions/" and "/info/solutions/" In B version: Canonical URL "/info/solutions/" What am I doing wrong and how do i fix this? Because ALL of my grades have dropped to Bs and Cs. Thanks! iklEHOjJLZE4966 [URL]]([URL=http://imgur.com/5BYcV][IMG]http://i.imgur.com/5BYcV.jpg[/IMG][/URL]) 5BYcV
Moz Pro | | aircyclemegan0