Can someone help with Canonical?

[jonnyholt]

I have a wordpress site that On-Page Grader is saying I don't have Canonical done correctly.  Here is the comment.

Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical

If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL.

Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply.

I have quite a few sites and have never had an issue with this.  Can anyone help?  I tried installing a plugin but that seems to have made it worse.  This is the front page of the site btw.

[MickEdwards]

What is the URL and what is the canonical tag in your head section?

[GPainter]

More information can be found here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394

Rel=canonical should be in the it should then point to the "original page"

lets use it in an exsample

two pages about a product (lets say a book)

www.exsample.com/book/thisawesomebook

www.exsample.com/book/author/thisawesomebook

Now we don't want duplicate content so we would put a link in the second page as its a bit further from the main page (though you can do it which ever way you like)

so in the head of www.exsample.com/book/author/thisawesomebook we would have

Give Moz  some time to re-crawl the page and pick up any changes.

I hope that helps clear it up, you can get plugins but its simple enough to do it by hand.

Best of luck.

[jonnyholt]

The link is a front page of a website though.

http://stellyweddings.com

I understand what Canonical is for, but this isn't a duplicated page, its the front page.  Im not sure why I would get the above error in On-Page grading.  Basically saying the page is grading  a B instead of an A because of the above error.

[GPainter]

Are you trying to set up canonical for the htttp version and www. version of your site ?

You don't need to set up canonical for your homepage especially if its poinitng towards the page your on.

You can always ignore that point of the on page grader if you feel its not relevant, its a guide not a guarantee.

[MickEdwards]

I agree with Chris and I would ignore the error/warning.  The canonical does not hurt being there on the homepage but in any case it is set correctly.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not sure what's tripping our warning (although that can occasionally be hyperactive), but I do see one problem. You're using the non-www version (which is fine, in theory), but your "Home" link goes to the "www..." version. You're sending Google a mixed signal with this. It doesn't seem to be causing major problems (no "www..." pages are in Google's index for your site), but I'd change the internal link to conform to the non-www default.

The basic problem is that Google and other crawlers (including ours) will keep visiting that "www..." and then get redirects and/or hit the canonical. It creates an odd loop that could waste crawler bandwidth and sends a mixed signal about your intent.

[jonnyholt]

Thanks for the heads up. Didn't realize that would make much of a difference but I corrected the problem.  Also, without me doing anything, the Canonical Error is fixed...