Rel Canonical problem or SEOmoz bug ?

[grzontan]

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

[Jinx14678]

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!

[grzontan]

So you think it is better to ask them remove the canonical tag ?

[Jinx14678]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.

[grzontan]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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.