On-Page Report Card & Rel Canonical

[rwilson-seo]

Hello,

I ran one of our pages through the On-Page Report Card. Among the results we are getting a lower grade due to the following "critical factor" :

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

Explanation

If 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.

Recommendation

We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.

This is for an e-commerce site, and the canonical links are inserted automatically by the cart software. The cart is also creating the canonical url as a relative link, not an absolute URL. In this particular case it's a self-referential link. I've read a ton on this and it seems that this should be okay (I also read that Bing might have an issue with this).

Is this really an issue? If so, what is the best practice to pass this critical factor?

Thanks,

Paul

[Jolora]

I think it would be best if the url was absolute. If you are only seeing the url segments for any given page in the canonical tag then it may cause a bit of confusion. It shouldn't be too hard to modify your e-commerce software to use absolute urls.

[evolvingSEO]

I would vote for absolute as well. Google seems to be handling the relative URL - see screenshot - http://screencast.com/t/qdg3cOucHM - it is only indexing the canonical version of the page. But if you can get your cart software to do absolute, that'd be ideal.

-Dan