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    Canonical in head best practice

    Technical SEO Issues
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    • Matt-J
      Matt-J last edited by

      Hi

      Is putting a list of canonical no follow links in the head the best practice? From SEO Moz analysis urls of duplicate content was flagged but now I have lots of cononicals in the head of my doc and the code looks untidy

      see head here : http://carpetflooringsdirect.com/

      Is there a cleaner way of doing this? and how do I retest to see if I have fixed?

      Many thanks

      Matt

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • seowoody
        seowoody last edited by

        Hi there,

        Not quite sure what you're trying to achieve here, but this is certainly not how the canonical tag is used.

        I would remove these asap from the homepage before something negative happens to your rankings.

        What are you trying to achieve? What was the duplicate content issue?

        Woody 🙂

        Oh, BTW - if your profile name is where you're located, I'm just down the A12 from you in Colchester.

        Matt-J 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Matt-J
          Matt-J @seowoody last edited by

          THanks Woody - Yes im just down the road...

          The Dashboard (craw diagnostic summary) flagged up the Urls as duplicates. So i have told the search engins not to follow - Is this not what I was suposed to do?

          Matt

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • AdamThompson
            AdamThompson last edited by

            You should definitely remove those canonical tags ASAP.

            Each page should only have one canonical tag - the correct canonical URL for that page.

            Hope that helps!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Matt-J
              Matt-J last edited by

              THanks for this I have remover although I still havent solved my Duplicate content problem...

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • seowoody
                seowoody last edited by

                So i have told the search engines not to follow.

                No you haven't. You have told the search engines that homepage is a canonical version of all these other URLs, which doesn't make sense and is most probably confusing the engines.

                I would remove these asap.

                Then take a closer look at the error craw diagnostic summary. Perhaps include a screenshot if you're still unsure.

                The canonical tag is to tell search engines which version of the page to index if you have variations of the same page which could occur through querystring parameters or something simple like this:

                • http://www.example.com/
                • http://www.example.com/index.html

                In this scenario you would simple add a this to the <HEAD> section of your index.html page to tell Google to only index http://www.example.com/ since index is exactly the same page.

                I would have a read up here as to the correct use of canonical tags - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

                Cheers,

                Woody 🙂

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • seowoody
                  seowoody last edited by

                  Add a screenshot of the errors. This will give us more info to be able to help you.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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