Rel canonical Issue

[JayAdams32]

I have a huge rel canonical issue showing up on my website, and I'm not sure that I fully understand why. To my knowledge, this is something that comes about when alternate urls are used to link to the same page. However, this is not a technique that I've used with my website, yet it's still raising a flag on just about every page.

http://bit.ly/jYyTYN

Can anyone enlighten me on what's causing this?

Thanks

[JayAdams32]

SEOmoz pro just finished crawling my website and it's coming up with 250 rel canonical warnings.

Here's one example:

http://bit.ly/ukLlbS

"

<dt>Description</dt>

<dt>Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical."</dt>

<dt>That's all it's saying. I also have metarobots set to noodp,noydir - but I'm sure that doesn't make any difference with this.</dt>

[NakulGoyal]

Having a quick look on your website, the use of canonical tag looks fine. What exactly is the problem you are having ?

[donford]

Hi Dorian,

To my knowledge the Rel Warning from SeoMoz doesn't mean something is wrong, rather that the tag was detected.

I believe this is because if you can, you should properly redirect 301 to the correct URL instead of saying hey don't index this as what you see but what I say (which is what rel canonical does). However, there are cases with dynamic URL's this isn't always avoidable so the tag does server a purpose.

[AlanMosley]

donford is correct, I believe the notive is to let you know where the canonicals are as they can be dangerous if you put them in wrong.

[JayAdams32]

Hi,

Thanks everyone for the great insight. I think I may have found another problem that's related to this though. I also have a lot of duplicate content warnings, which is also odd. Here's what I found.

Seems like I have tag urls linking to content - for instance:

autodebut.com/tag/carrera/

is this considered being linked to the actual post/perma?

autodebut.com/2012/techart-2012-porsche-911-revealed-at-geneva-motor-show/#more-6382

Could that be causing the problem?

[Dr-Pete]

You mean because there's only one entry in that tag result? It's not necessarily a problem, but if you spin out a lot of those tag pages, that content can look a little thin. It's a balancing act. As the site grows, you may want to consider whether or not to let every tag be indexed. Usually, it's only a problem on large sites, though.

[JayAdams32]

I'm still learning, so it's a little hard for me to explain. But basically, I have 95 duplicate content warnings. What's coming up is the tag linked to the post and the actual post itself. Which in itself seems like a problem, plus I thought maybe that's related to the rel can. notices.

[Dr-Pete]

We tag near-duplicates in the system, so I think you've got a combination of factors:

(1) There's only one post on some of the tag pages.

(2) The posts don't have a lot of text, so the "snippet" duplicates about 1/3 to 1/2 of it.

(3) The navigation/code is pretty heavy, compared to content.

Once those tag pages have more posts/snippets, I don't think you'll see problems. Be careful, as you grow, with how many tags you create. Tag searches can start to look a bit thin, and you may want to exclude them (or some of them) from the search index down the road. For now, I think you're probably ok. Once those tags have 3-4 snippets on them, the pages should look a lot better.