Using Canonical URLs option in Platinum SEO for Wordpress
-
SEOMOZ says that my site has 150 <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs and lists that as a potential problem. It's a check box in the settings for Platinum SEO and here is the description it provides:</a>
<a title="Click for Help!">Choose this option to set up canonical URLs for your Home page, Single Post, Category and Tag Pages.</a>
I have the option engaged. So I was trying to figure out the best thing to do. I have already instructed it to automatically make 301 redirects for any permalink changes and have instructed it to "noindex" tag archives,rss comment feeds, and rss feeds.
I've only been doing this for about a year and am really confused right now. After reading most of your posts about the subject I have a much better understanding, but still very confused.
Help..Please...
-
It looks like you did a big mess in your blog, SeoMOZ says "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical." and nothing more.
How to use - description is in On-Page Report Card in Critical Factors section.
"ExplanationIf the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL."
Take Care, M.
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 - do my web pages need them?
Hello, I'm going round in circles with this issue, so hopefully someone can help... The Moz crawl of my website lists a number of pages as "missing canonical url". The pages are all different and do not have similar content. Do I need to add a canonical url to each page? My agency quoted the following (x referencing this page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls) list itemYou would use Canonical URLs if: list item"...you have a single page that's accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page." list itemThis is not the case here and so we would not propose to change anything. We could add Canonical URLs if the client feels that it is critical which occurs an additional cost. Any help / advice much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | rj_dale0 -
Which url should i use? Thanks!
I have a question regarding how to use my url, we are a Swedish-based website which have the url, http://interimslösning.se/ (that contains the Swedish letter “ö”) so the url can also be written as http://xn--interimslsning-3pb.se/. Which of the following url should I use for my backlinks, http://interimslösning.se/ or http://xn--interimslsning-3pb.se/ ? What is the difference between them regarding SEO? And is it good or bad to use letter like "ö" or other characters like that in your url? I was thinking that maybe it is good to use the letter "ö" for local search optimization in sweden, but i don't know.. Thanks in advance! Greetings,
Technical SEO | | Kiwibananlime
Paul Linderoth0 -
Numbers in URL
Hey guys! Need your many awesome brains. 🙂 This may be a very basic question but am hoping you can help me out with some insights beyond "because Google says it's better". 🙂 I only recently started working with SEO, and I work for a SaaS website builder company that has millions of open/active user sites, and all our user sites URLs, instead of www.mydomainname.com/gallery or myusername.simplesite.com/about, we use numbers, so www.mysite.com/453112 or myusername.simplesite.com/426521 The Sales manager has asked me to figure out if it will pay off for us in terms of traffic (other benefits?) to change it from the number system to the "proper" and right way of setting up these URLs. He's looking for rather concrete answers, as he usually sits with paid search and is therefore used to the mindset of "if we do x it will yield us y in z months". I'm finding it quite difficult to find case studies/other concrete examples beyond the generic, vague implication that it will simply be "better" (when for example looking at SEO checklists and search engine guidelines). Will it make a difference? How so? I have to convince our developers of the importance and priority of this adjustment, or it will just drown in the many projects they already have. So truly, any insights would be so very welcome. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | michelledemaree2 -
SEO Redirect
If we have several hundred domain names currently using a park page, would we be better served having them redirect to our corporate homepage for SEO purposes?
Technical SEO | | mkessler0 -
Canonical URL Tag: Confusing Use Case
We have a webpage that changes content each evening at mid-night -- let's call this page URL /foo. This allows a user to bookmark URL /foo and obtain new content each day. In our case, the content on URL /foo for a given day is the same content that exists on another URL on our website. Let's say the content for November 5th is URL /nov05, November 6th is /nov06 and so on. This means on November 5th, there are two pages on the website that have almost identical content -- namely /foo and /nov05. This is likely a duplication of content violation in the view of some search engines. Is the Canonical URL Tag designed to be used in this situation? The page /nov05 is the permanent page containing the content for the day on the website. This means page /nov05 should have a Canonical Tag that points to itself and /foo should have a Canonical Tag that points to /nov05. Correct? Now here is my problem. The page at URL /foo is the fourth highest page authority on our 2,000+ page website. URL /foo is a key part of the marketing strategy for the website. It has the second largest number of External Links second only to our home page. I must tell you that I'm concerned about using a Cononical URL Tag that points away from the URL /foo to a permanent page on the website like /nov05. I can think of a lot of things negative things that could happen to the rankings of the page by making a change like this and I am not sure what we would gain. Right now /foo has a Canonical URL Tag that points to itself. Does anyone believe we should change this? If so, to what and why? Thanks for helping me think this through! Greg
Technical SEO | | GregSims0 -
Crawl reveals hundreds of urls with multiple urls in the url string
The latest crawl of my site revealed hundreds of duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors. When I looked it was from a large number of urls with urls appended to them at the end. For example: http://www.test-site.com/page1.html/page14.html or http://www.test-site.com/page4.html/page12.html/page16.html some of them go on for a hundred characters. I am totally stymied, as are the people at my ISP and the person who talked to me on the phone from SEOMoz. Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks So much for any help you can offer! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
Is a 302 useful here?
We have a site that had one super successful viral video a couple of years back and basically the site needs a ton of work to even be functional. We don't have the time or the resources to even touch it. Our video is still getting tons of views today and I'm fairly certain it's the only reason the site still gets traffic. Most of the views come from youtube which prompts them to check out the site. We plan on going back to the site at a later date, but for now wanted to redirect it to another site of ours. In this case is it best practice to 302? or is a 301 still the proper solution?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
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
