Rel Canonical problem or SEOmoz bug ?
-
Hello all,
I hope that sombody out there could help me with my question.
I am very new in SEO and in SEOmoz community. I am not familiar with coding. I am goining to start learning soon enough but till now I now only basics.
At the website where I am trying to optimize for SEO I am reciving this Crawl Diagnostic Programme.
Issue: Rel Canonical (Notice) not Error
I searched and lerned what it is. So I contact the developers of the website. Build in wordpress and ask them how to corrected ? They told me that they are using Canonical Tags to all their pages and have no idea why SEOmoz keep identifining it as a "notice"
They also tel me to check the source code of page to see the canonical tag. I did and their is actuall a canonical tag there.
Cjeck please here www.costanavarinogolf.com
So do you have any idea why this is happening ? could you help me explaiin to developers what they should do to overcome this ?
Or it's just a bug of SEOmoz and not a reall problem exist ?
Thank you very much for your time
-
I'd honestly leave it alone. I've never seen a preventive canonical (even if unnecessary) cause problems. As you expand the site, it could help prevent future problems, implemented correctly.
In terms of SEOmoz, I wouldn't worry about the notice - it's just a notice, which we put even below a warning. We're evaluating how to assess canonical for future versions of the software, because it is confusing to people.
-
Thank you both really for helping me out.
SEOmoz crawls 20 pages and all the pages have a canonical notice. I know that is not something big and maybe not important. But I really want to know why is happening as will help me to undrstand canonical issues better. I did a lot of research alone to realize what is canonicalization and trust meis very dificult if you have no idea about codeing.
So you suggest to tell the delelopers only to use cnonical on home page. and then wait to see if this solve the issue ?
Thank you very much both for your help
-
I'm not seeing any issues. Your canonical tags seem correct. The "Notice" level is the least severe, and we may just be seeing a mismatched URL or two (we're crawling the non-canonical, in other words). In many cases, that's fine. I see no signs of duplicate content in the Google index itself.
We sometimes to recommend preventive canonical tags, especially on dynamic sites, but they're not necessary on all page. I do highly recommend using it on the home-page, as home pages can easily collect variants ("www" vs non-www, secure/https, tracking parameters, etc.).
I think our system is being hyperactive on this one, though. I see no reason to worry.
-
Technically Yes,
As your site is currently being used canonical seems redundant, The site is Wordpress, so the ability to redirect must be available (I am assuming of course)
So I am not sure I see a reason for a site wide implementation of Canonical, although there are so many other reasons, that really without having more knowledge about your particular situation, I cannot for sure say they are right or wrong.
I would only suggest that you ask them why Canonical is implemented, and if it even needs to be there since duplicate content does not seem to be a factor.
If you do not like their answer then I would bring it back to this forum. (not necessarily this thread as it may not get answered if alot of time has passed)
Shane
-
So you think it is better to ask them remove the canonical tag ?
-
I really did not spend to long looking at your site, but was not sure I understood why canonical was used at all?
I see that this site, is not really being utilized as a traditional "Blog" so you would not actually have the duplicated content issues that come along with Blog Posts having their own page, plus being on the homepage.
I am not sure I can give you a suggestion to give to the developers except, why is canonical being used when it appears it does not need to be used?
If you do have multiple pages of duplicate content then this would be a reason, but I did not see them.
The notices you are getting from SEOMOZ are just that... Notices that the Canonical is in place i believe.
So i guess in summary the actual question I would have is do you really need the Canonical Tag at all? I am not sure it is hurting you, but not sure you need it either.
There are also some META tags that really have no use.. example INDEX, FOLLOW the default without a counter NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW or robots.txt is always INDEX FOLLOW.
Hope this helps
w00t!
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
-
Rel: Canonical - checking advice provided by SEO agency
Hey all, We have two brands one bigger and one smaller that are on 2 different domains. We are wanting to repost some of the articles from the smaller brand to the bigger brand and what was a bit of curve ball, our SEO agency advised us NOT to put a rel: canonical on the reposted articles on the bigger brands site. This is counter to what i'm used to and just wanted to confirm with the gurus out there if this is good advice or bad advice. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Index problems, Part 2
Hi Guy's A few weeks ago i posted a question:
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO
https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/index-problems After some good advice, we changed a few things: www.domain.com <<< NL version www.domain.com/fr/ <<<< French version (domain.com/nl/ 301 redirect to domain.com). So the SERPS for keyword ‘shutters’ went from #32 to #8...... for 2 day's.... and gone.... and not comming back anymore.... Did we missed something? Help is much appreciated, thanks 🙂3 -
Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"
I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ? All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page. My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category. For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section : http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place. For this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories. If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated ! Thanks
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Rel Canonical ? please help
Can some one please answer a question for me, I have a crawl error stating that I have [#### Rel Canonical 326](http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/243472/issues/18) Can you please advise me on how serious these Errors are? I was told by one person not to worry but It seems far to many to me. thanks
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Similar pages: noindex or rel:canonical or disregard parameters?!
Hey all! We have a hotel booking website that has search results pages per destinations (e.g. hotels in NYC is dayguest.com/nyc). Pages are also generated for destinations depending on various parameters, that can be star rating, amenities, style of the properties, etc. (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc/4stars, dayguest.com/nyc/luggagestorage, dayguest.com/nyc/luxury, etc.). In general, all of these pages are very similar, as for example, there might be 10 hotels in NYC and all of them will offer luggage storage. Pages can be nearly identical. Come the problems of duplicate content and loss of juice by dilution. I was wondering what was the best practice in such a situation: should I just put all pages except the most important ones (e.g. dayguest.com/nyc) as noindex? Or set it as canonical page for all variations? Or in google webmaster tool ask google to disregard the URLs for various parameters? Or do something else altogether?! Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Philoups0 -
Problems with pages loading within seomoz account
any one else have the problem of pages loading once logged into their seomoz account??
Technical SEO | | james1000 -
Rel=canonical + no index
We have been doing an a/b test of our hp and although we placed a rel=canonical tag on the testing page it is still being indexed. In fact at one point google even had it showing as a sitelink . We have this problem through out our website. My question is: What is the best practice for duplicate pages? 1. put only a rel= canonical pointing to the "wanted original page" 2. put a rel= canonical (pointing to the wanted original page) and a no index on the duplicate version Has anyone seen any detrimental effect doing # 2? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
How can you manually diagnose the canonical problem
Good Monrning from snow dusted minus 3 degrees C Wetherby UK... Is there a quick way to diagnose wether or not a website has a canonical problem or not? So far Ive been doing this for example: Typing a full web address then one without the w's and seeing if a 301 redirect has been set up. But I'm not confident this is the best way to diagnose if there is a canonical problem with a site. I would like to ad that I want to see if a canonical problem exists with any site and webmanster tools is not available. Any insights welcome 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nightwing1