Rel Canonical
-
hi folks
sorry i really am confused and not very good with technical terms
i have 553 Rel Canonical notices but i cant understand what Rel Canonical actually means it kinda sounds like there links that go nowhere to help the seo ranking? am i right or just in way over my head?
please use the most basic language you can
cheers
donal
-
The "Notice" level is just telling you that your pages all have rel=canonical elements on them, and they all seem to be pointing to themselves. This is really just a heads up, and doesn't indicate a problem, per se.
As you grow, I think you may want to control how some of your very similar pages are indexed, such as color and quantity variations. These pages can look "thin" to Google, in that they're very similar. Currently, though, your site is small enough that it shouldn't be a big issue, and our notice is the lowest least severe message (notice < warning < error).
The rel=canonical element basically tells Google that two URLs are equivalent or very similar, and to only allow one to rank. This helps control duplicates and avoid issues with Panda or having Google filter out pages in unexpected ways.
-
im still totally confused but ill make the question different is it a good thing to have 553 Rel Canonical things or should i try get rid/fix them??
-
Canonical URL's are two url's that point to the exact same webpage.
It's not a link that users can click on or anything. It's like an invisible note to search engines that tells them there are other URL's on your website that point to the same page. It keeps search engines from getting confused.
-
Hi Donal
I really can't explain it better than the SEOMoz guide itself, which you can read here.
Getting the notices in the ranking report is not a bad thing at all - it only serves to remind you that you have the tags on your site and to make sure they're set up correctly.
Have a read through the guide given above, as it helps explain how and why we might want to use them in simple terms.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Duplicate Page Content, Indexing and Rel Canonical Just DOUBLED! Need Advice to Fix
Last Friday (Penguin 5/2.1) my website shot way off the grid and I noticed in my MOZ PRO Campaign dashboard that all of the following just doubled in numbers on my website: duplicate page content, Google indexing, and rel canonicals. I also noticed that some of my pages, images, tags and categories now added a /page/2/ or a -2. I just changed noindex for tags, but indexing for media, pages, posts, and categories. I'm currently using All In One SEO for a plugin. Any advice would be much appreciated as I'm stuck on the issue. relconical.png Duplicate-Page-Content.png [Duplicate Content II](Duplicate Content II) index1.png
Moz Pro | | CelebrityPersonalTrainer0 -
Rel Canonical
Just had my site crawled by Moz Pro for the 2nd time and its flagged up 925 Rel Canonical issues. Most of the pages are similar but with different content. Please can someone tell me what i need to do to sort this issue...? www.indigocarhire.co.uk Thanks
Moz Pro | | RGOnline0 -
Adding canonical still returns duplicate pages
According to SEOmoz, several of my campaigns show that I have duplicate pages (SEOmoz Errors). Upon reading more about how to resolve the issue, I followed SEOmoz's suggestion to add rel='canonical' <links>to each page. After the next SEOmoz crawl, the number of SEOmoz Errors related to duplicate pages remained the same and the number of SEOmoz notices shot up indicating that it recognized that I added rel='canonical'.</links> I'm still puzzled as to why the SEOmoz errors did not go down with respect to duplicate page errors after I added rel='canonical', especially since SEOmoz noticed that I added them. Can anyone explain this to me? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | MOZ2
Scott.0 -
canonical URL tag
Hello, I was checking my ON page SEO, and one of the things i see Number of Canonical tags 2 Remove all but a single canonical URL tag I didn't fully understand, what is canonical URL tag? my website is http://novitasalonandspa.com Thanks for help
Moz Pro | | vlad_mezoz0 -
Why does Rel Canonical show up as a notice?
In the crawl diagnostics screen "Rel Canonical" shows up as a notice for every page that has a rel="canonical" meta tag in it. Why is this the case? Shouldn't every page have a canonical tag on it to show the absolute URL to the content? Wouldn't a better notice be to display pages that do not have a canonical tag instead? I could be wrong but that would make more sense to me. (In fact.. let's be honest here.. I probably am wrong.. but I'd like someone to explain it if they could.) Thanks
Moz Pro | | rrolfe1 -
'Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical', Critical Factor but appears correct on page
Hi, Trying to get the following page ranked unsuccessfully.... http://www.joules.com/en-GB/2/Collections-Quilted-Jackets/c01c02.r16.1 Instead a product page is being ranked, shown below.... http://www.joules.com/en-GB/Womens-Quilted-Jacket/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction When I run the on page report card it advises that the Rel Canonical tag needs to point to that page, but we have checked and it looks to be doing that already. Has anyone else had an issue like this? Thanks, Martin
Moz Pro | | rockethot0 -
Duplicate content & canonicals
Hi, Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries. The setup is like this: www.website.eu/nl
Moz Pro | | nvs.nim
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
... You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch... The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages. Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa? Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?0 -
SEOMOZ Canonical notices using Wordpress
I keeping getting the notice from SEO Moz Crawls relating to Canonical issues. I have tried Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO and both insert the appropriate canonical code... Can anyone help determine why the crawls report this notice? Check out seoontario.ca\testamonials for an example. Could it be because the site in my SEOMOZ crawl does not have the http:// prefix? I've now installed FV Simpler SEO, a variant of All In Once SEO, but am getting the same canonical code...
Moz Pro | | kbryanton0