Crawl Diagnostics - Understanding Rel Canonical Notices

[travis.hickox]

This post is deleted!

[Dr-Pete]

Your canonical tags appear to be badly formed. For example, look at these 2 pages:

(1) http://www.iministries.org/Blog.aspx?blog_id=86239&site_id=10267

(2) http://www.iministries.org/10267/blog/blog_id/86239/System-Updates

Page (1) has a canonical to:

http://www.iministries.org/Blog.aspx?blog_id=86239&site_id=10267

...which is self-referencing and should be ok. Page (2) has a canonical to:

http://www.iministries.org/blog.aspx?site_id=10267&blog_id=86239

This looks similar, but the parameters are reversed and "blog.aspx" is in lower-case. Any variation in a URL can spin out a duplicate. In essence, you're not only not canonicalizing these, but you're creating a 3rd URL. Across the site, this could cause a real mess.

[travis.hickox]

This post is deleted!

[Dr-Pete]

(1) The canonical tags look correct, but Google is still indexing two copies:

http://www.iministries.org/blogentry.aspx?entry_id=247067&site_id=10267

http://www.iministries.org/10267/blogentry/entry_id/247067/Seth-Godins-Advice-For-Creating-Church-Website-Content

A big part of the problem is that you're using the keyword-rich URL as the link on the home-page, but the dynamic URL as the canonical tag. It's a mixed signal. The canonical URL should actually BE canonical. In other words, it should match your internal link structure. Otherwise, Google may not honor it.

(2) The trailing slash on the home-page (or lack of it) isn't usually a big deal these ways. Again, you may be linking to both version internally. I can't see clear evidence of that, though.

(3) I wouldn't get hung up on the notices - I'd focus on the duplicate content warnings. Focus on the big ones, and the overall count should drop over time. Notices are just that - they aren't necessarily big issues in all cases.

(4) I don't think each crawl is 100% of the site, but I'm not completely sure on that. The system will update gradually. It's important to watch Google's index as well. Honestly, though, Google is the same way - some pages of your site are crawled more often. Give it time. If you keep creating new campaigns, you'll lose all history, and end up shooting yourself in the foot. The goal is gradual improvement and hitting critical issues, not warning-free perfection.

[Dr-Pete]

BTW, you seem to be reposting on your own site:

http://www.travishickox.com/22/content/content_id/197894/iMinistries

You're weakening the post that way and potentially causing problems for the main site.

[travis.hickox]

Thank you for pointing this out! I just learned about how this negatively impacts results yesterday and because I rarely even visit my website, I totally forgot.

[travis.hickox]

Thank you for this information. I will pass this along to our developer.

In reference to (3), I agree with. However, I was bringing it up because I was unsure if we were to correct our canonicals, all of the duplicate content warnings as well as duplicate titles, would go away.

We aren't creating, nor does our CMS create, duplicate posts.