Crawl Diagnostics - 350 Critical errors? But I used rel-canonical links

[Bendall]

Hello Mozzers,

We launched a new website on Monday and had our first MOZ crawl on 01/07/15 which came back with 350+ critical errors.

The majority of these were for duplicate content. We had a situation like this for each gym class:

GLOBAL YOGA CLASS (canonical link / master record)

• YOGA CLASS BROMLEY

• YOGA CLASS OXFORD

• YOGA CLASS GLASGOW etc

All of these local Yoga pages had the canonical link deployed. So why is this regarded as an error by MOZ?

Should I have added robots NO INDEX instead? Would think help?

Very scared our rankings are gonna get effected

Ben

[Bendall]

Hi Patrick,

That is super useful and thank you. I have read up as suggested on MOZ and Webmaster tools and you are bang on - absolute over relative urls to be used in canonicals.

I will ask our developers to fix.

I wonder whether MOZ will ignore this as an error in its crawl diagnostics thereafter?

Ben

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would first read the duplicate content resources from both Google and Moz so you can spot check your pages.

Also, I would read the following resource from Google, that states:

"Avoid errors: use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the rel="canonical" link element.

Use this structure:  https://www.example.com/dresses/green/greendresss.html
Not this structure: /dresses/green/greendress.html." You are currently using the second structure in your canonical tags. Try switching to an absolute URL structure and see how that works.

Hope this helps! Good luck!