Canonical tag not working
-
I have a weebly site and I put the canonical tag in the header code but the moz crawler still says that I'm missing the canonical tag. Any tips?
-
I'm glad that worked. I'm not familiar with Weebly, but I'm happy to take a look if you want to send me some examples.
-
Wow, thank you so much. This solved my issue!!
Are you familiar with canonical tags on Weebly blog pages? Any idea how to sort that out? I tried adding custom HTML, but it appears that didn't work. Appreciate your help!
-
Hi,
This looks like a copy paste error to me. If you look at the cource code of your site compared to another site with a canonical that you know works, you'll see that the quotes around the canonical and the URL are blue. They should be a different colour. If you look at the image I've shared, you'll see the other links in the source code have different colours for the quotation marks.
My guess is you pasted this from a rich formatting document like MS word or something or the quotes are the wrong order. To fix it, open up a plain text editor like the basic notepad and write it out again. Then add it to the site without formatting. This should fix it.
If you want to double check the HTML, I recommend downloading a free text editor like Visual Studio Code which makes it a bit easier to see the formatting is correct as you're writing HTML. See the attached image as an example.
Let me know if this solves your problem.
-
Yes, Moz has re-crawled the page several times. My website is ctpolarbears.com; I viewed the page source and it looks like it's there, just not sure if it's in the correct spot? Thank you for your help.
-
Are you sure Moz has re-crawled the page since you added the tag?
Verify the tag is actually there by right clicking on your page and selecting to view source. If it's there, Google will eventually see it.
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
-
ALT tags - How important are they?
I realise ALT tags are important from an accessibility perspective but in terms of organic search, do they carry much value? I have a big site and it doesn't look like ALT tags have been added generally, it would be a massive job to fix and I'm just trying to weigh up what to concentrate on first. Does anybody have any real life experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Do you need a canonical tag for search and filter pages?
Hi Moz Community, We've been implementing new canonical tags for our category pages but I have a question about pages that are found via search and our filtering options. Would we still need a canonical tag for pages that show up in search + a filter option if it only lists one page of items? Example below. www.uncommongoods.com/search.html/find/?q=dog&exclusive=1 Thanks!
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Meta tags in Single Page Apps
Since the deprecation of the AJAX Crawling Scheme back last October I am curious as to when Googlebot actually reads meta tag information from a page. We have a website at whichledlight.com that is implemented using emberjs. Part of the site is our results pages (i.e. gu10-led-bulbs). This page updates the meta and link tags in the head of the document for things like canonicalisation and robots, but can only do so after the page finishes loading and the JavaScript has been run.When the AJAX crawling scheme was still in place we were able to prerender these pages (including the modified meta and link tags) and serve these to Googlebot. Now Googlebot no longer uses these prerendered snapshots and instead is sophisticated enough load and run our site.So the question I have is does Googlebot read the meta and links tags downloaded from the original response or does it wait until the page finishes rendering before reading them (including any modifications that have been performed on them)
Technical SEO | | TrueluxGroup1 -
Use 301 or rel=canonical
I have a page on my site that is showing in search results at #9. I created another page on my site with the search term in the url. Wondering if I 301 or rel=canonical. Thank you, Kerry
Technical SEO | | Hydraulicgirl0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Bars Verus Hyphens in Title Tags
It has been quite a while since I have seen an article really talk about this and I am wondering if this even matters anymore? I prefer the look of a - rather than a | but just wondering if this is still a thing... If you know of a recent article going into findings on this supporting one or the other it would be appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0 -
Duplicate pages in Google index despite canonical tag and URL Parameter in GWMT
Good morning Moz... This is a weird one. It seems to be a "bug" with Google, honest... We migrated our site www.three-clearance.co.uk to a Drupal platform over the new year. The old site used URL-based tracking for heat map purposes, so for instance www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html ..could be reached via www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=menu or www.three-clearance.co.uk/apple-phones.html?ref=sidebar and so on. GWMT was told of the ref parameter and the canonical meta tag used to indicate our preference. As expected we encountered no duplicate content issues and everything was good. This is the chain of events: Site migrated to new platform following best practice, as far as I can attest to. Only known issue was that the verification for both google analytics (meta tag) and GWMT (HTML file) didn't transfer as expected so between relaunch on the 22nd Dec and the fix on 2nd Jan we have no GA data, and presumably there was a period where GWMT became unverified. URL structure and URIs were maintained 100% (which may be a problem, now) Yesterday I discovered 200-ish 'duplicate meta titles' and 'duplicate meta descriptions' in GWMT. Uh oh, thought I. Expand the report out and the duplicates are in fact ?ref= versions of the same root URL. Double uh oh, thought I. Run, not walk, to google and do some Fu: http://is.gd/yJ3U24 (9 versions of the same page, in the index, the only variation being the ?ref= URI) Checked BING and it has indexed each root URL once, as it should. Situation now: Site no longer uses ?ref= parameter, although of course there still exists some external backlinks that use it. This was intentional and happened when we migrated. I 'reset' the URL parameter in GWMT yesterday, given that there's no "delete" option. The "URLs monitored" count went from 900 to 0, but today is at over 1,000 (another wtf moment) I also resubmitted the XML sitemap and fetched 5 'hub' pages as Google, including the homepage and HTML site-map page. The ?ref= URls in the index have the disadvantage of actually working, given that we transferred the URL structure and of course the webserver just ignores the nonsense arguments and serves the page. So I assume Google assumes the pages still exist, and won't drop them from the index but will instead apply a dupe content penalty. Or maybe call us a spam farm. Who knows. Options that occurred to me (other than maybe making our canonical tags bold or locating a Google bug submission form 😄 ) include A) robots.txt-ing .?ref=. but to me this says "you can't see these pages", not "these pages don't exist", so isn't correct B) Hand-removing the URLs from the index through a page removal request per indexed URL C) Apply 301 to each indexed URL (hello BING dirty sitemap penalty) D) Post on SEOMoz because I genuinely can't understand this. Even if the gap in verification caused GWMT to forget that we had set ?ref= as a URL parameter, the parameter was no longer in use because the verification only went missing when we relaunched the site without this tracking. Google is seemingly 100% ignoring our canonical tags as well as the GWMT URL setting - I have no idea why and can't think of the best way to correct the situation. Do you? 🙂 Edited To Add: As of this morning the "edit/reset" buttons have disappeared from GWMT URL Parameters page, along with the option to add a new one. There's no messages explaining why and of course the Google help page doesn't mention disappearing buttons (it doesn't even explain what 'reset' does, or why there's no 'remove' option).
Technical SEO | | Tinhat0 -
Canonical on ecommerce pages
I have seen some competitors using the nofollow tag as well as canonical on all refinements and sorts on their ecommerce pages. Example being if you went to their hard drive category page and refined by 500gb hard drives then that page would have a canonical element to send it back to hard drives page without the refinement. I see how this could be good for control indexation and the amount pages Google crawls, but do you see problems in using the canonical tag this way? Also I have seen competitors have category page descriptions (describing what that type of product is) on all pagenation and refinements (the exact same block of text on all of the pages). Would this be a duplicate content problem or is it not that big of a deal since the content is only on their site so they are only competiting with themselves. Thanks for your help
Technical SEO | | Gordian0