Rel=canonical

[joemas99]

Hi, there is something puzzling us about the rel=canonical reports...

On the general report that is generated after the system crawls our site, we have blue flags on the rel=canonical tag, but the flags don't actually specify exactly what is wrong, they just say: "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical." so we presumed that we should take the rel=canonical tag out of our pages, and after we did so, we noticed that the on-page-report-card (the one that shows up when you run the keyword page optimization tool from the research tools) says (close to the bottom of the report) that we should have 1 canonical tag on each page.

So right now we're confused, the general website crawl report flags the rel canonical as being bad and then the on page report flags not having them, we don't really know what to do, should we keep the rel=canonical or not? We are using wordpress to power our site, wordpress has a built-in system for generating the rel canonical for each page, I've checked that and the tags are being generated properly, but we have no idea why the general website report flags them in blue, the error message is not too comprehensive.

Any help or information you could provide would be much appreciated. Our website is taxproblem.org thanks.

[DanDeceuster]

I'm not sure what the deal is with blue flags and report cards, but if you have duplicate pages, you should either use the 301 redirect or the rel=canonical tag. My guess is that maybe you had a rel=canonical tag on a page that pointed to the same page, so maybe the crawling tool took that to be some kind of error? I don't know, but make sure your duplicate pages are either redirected to the original or that they use a rel=canonical tag to specify the original, and don't worry about any reports that are simply notifying you of the purpose of a canonical tag.