Rel canonical

[FFTCOUK]

Hi,

Since we sorted all duplication issues using the rel canonical tag in the home page, and redirects in the htaccess file, our Moz Ranking has dropped markedly (possibly because there are now less apparent links on our site. At the same time our rankings and traffic from Google have dropped markedly.

I notice that none of our top ranking competitors are using the rel canonical tag in the source on their home pages.

We have just performed the same seo strategy on another unrelated site with the same immediate drop in MOZ ranking.

[JarnoNijzing]

FFTCOUK,

are you sure you are using the rel=canonical in the right way? You should include it linking to your own page and on page duplicates so you let the search engines know what page is the original one. If there only is one copy op the page you could debate the fact that the rel=canonical isn't necessary for that page.

For instance: If you have 3 pages about vacuum cleaners and page A is the original one then you include a rel=canonical on page A, B and C all pointing to page A

But what if you only have page A? Why should it then link to page A telling that this is the original post? There's only one page about the subject so that makes it the original post right?

I feel pretty strong about using code that has a use for it. For instance, the keyword tag is no longer used by search engines only by your competitors, so why use it? If you only have one page about a specific subject, why use the rel=canonical? The only reason I can come up with is that when someone duplicates your page they include the tag pointing to your site.

Misuse of technical solutions for specific issues doesn't seem right to me. You can use a car, but if you drive to fast or on the wrong lane you're misusing the technical solution for transporting yourself of goods from location A to B and if you get caught doing so, you will be punished. Right?

Hope i made some sense to you.

Any other thoughts on this matter?

regards

Jarno

[Dr-Pete]

Just to second @Jarno - my immediate reaction is that the implementation went very wrong (which is far too easy when you're messing with .htaccess). The only times I've seen rel=canonical harm a site's rankings is when an implementation cause a ton of non-identical pages to be canonical'ed to just a few pages.

It depends a lot on scale, too. Google has had issues with very large-scale 301 redirect implementations, for example - especially if the 301s don't seem to be appropriate or are just to consolidate authority. I expect them to crack down more on that.

When you say "Moz Ranking", do you mean the MozRank metric, or the actual search rankings as measured by our tools?

[FFTCOUK]

Hi, Thanks to both Peter & Jarno for their replies.

I must apologise in that I meant that the Domain Authority, as measured in the Competitive Domain Analysis, which has suffered principally in each case the actual Domain Mozrank has only changed a little.

Yes I am sure we are using the rel canonical tag correctly. We got this information from SEOMOZ forum and checked it out independently.  Removing the duplication resulted in the correct number of files being seen.

Howard

[Dr-Pete]

I can't think of any reason using canonicals would impact your Domain Authority in our metrics (again, unless something went horribly wrong). My best guess is that this is a coincidence and you've got something else going on, likely something related to your link profile.

[FFTCOUK]

Thanks Peter,

I will check this out further