Rel Canonical

[homebrew1]

hi folks

sorry i really am confused and not very good with technical terms

i have 553 Rel Canonical notices but i cant understand what Rel Canonical actually means it kinda sounds like there links that go nowhere to help the seo ranking? am i right or just in way over my head?

please use the most basic language you can

cheers

donal

[TomRayner]

Hi Donal

I really can't explain it better than the SEOMoz guide itself, which you can read here.

Getting the notices in the ranking report is not a bad thing at all - it only serves to remind you that you have the tags on your site and to make sure they're set up correctly.

Have a read through the guide given above, as it helps explain how and why we might want to use them in simple terms.

Hope this helps!

[SVmedia]

Canonical URL's are two url's that point to the exact same webpage.

It's not a link that users can click on or anything.  It's like an invisible note to search engines that tells them there are other URL's on your website that point to the same page.  It keeps search engines from getting confused.

[homebrew1]

im still totally confused but ill make the question different is it a good thing to have 553 Rel Canonical things or should i try get rid/fix them??

[Dr-Pete]

The "Notice" level is just telling you that your pages all have rel=canonical elements on them, and they all seem to be pointing to themselves. This is really just a heads up, and doesn't indicate a problem, per se.

As you grow, I think you may want to control how some of your very similar pages are indexed, such as color and quantity variations. These pages can look "thin" to Google, in that they're very similar. Currently, though, your site is small enough that it shouldn't be a big issue, and our notice is the lowest least severe message (notice < warning < error).

The rel=canonical element basically tells Google that two URLs are equivalent or very similar, and to only allow one to rank. This helps control duplicates and avoid issues with Panda or having Google filter out pages in unexpected ways.