Canonical url does not seem to be recognised by Moz

[creative.digital]

Hey guys, forgive me... brand new user of Moz. Moz is telling me I have duplicate url's - a lot of them. Investigating I see that it is classing

_http://creativedigital.co.nz/artprints/lake-tekapo-church-of-the-good-shepherd?tag=lake_

as a duplicate of

_http://creativedigital.co.nz/artprints/lake-tekapo-church-of-the-good-shepherd_

even though there is a canonical tag in head as follows

I'm not quite sure what I am doing wrong. Any advice would really be appreciated

Mike

[Hurf]

Hi Mike,

The Moz toolbar is reading that canonical link correctly, so I wouldn't be overly concerned. An update of the Mozscape API will take place at around the 28th of this month. (https://moz.com/products/api/updates) you are likely to see different results then.

EDIT: The formatting of the canonical was, indeed, askew - I need an eye test. (In my defence, it was late and Gin.)

You have other on-site issues to deal with, including hundreds of broken links, other duplicate content issues and and broken HTTPS version of your home page (https://creativedigital.co.nz/artprints/)  - You should be looking to move from HTTP to HTTPS as soon as you are able, as Google are really pushing for this - Certbot and LetsEncrypt would work on your setup.

If you'd like, PM me your email address and I'll send you over a Site Audit - free and gratis (I created it to investigate this for you, so you may as well benefit from it).

I hope that helps.

[moz_support]

Hey Mike! It looks like the formatting of that canonical tag might be off. You can read more about canonicalization and proper formatting here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Here is a post about how we detect duplicate content: https://moz.com/devblog/near-duplicate-detection/

For more information on using canonical tags, check out this great post by our very own Dr. Pete: 
http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

If you have any additional questions about interpreting the canonical flags, feel free to reach out to us at help@moz.com!

[creative.digital]

Thanks for this Lisa, I have popped a bit of php in to reformat to:

It seems all links in the head were being generated in the same format regardless. Hopefully this might work.

[creative.digital]

Thank you for the response. I will PM you now...

[Hurf]

Well spotted. I've booked my eyes in for a polish, first thing in the morning. Well, that or someone's spiked my Gin with some tonic water.

[signcreator]

I am having sort of the same issue.

Joomla plugin sh404SEF has a canonical field that I have been using as I can only code in the body of the pages in Joomla.  It makes the tag syntax:

<link href="http://customsigncenter.com/itemlist/category/40-soccer-banners" rel="canonical">

Some of them are recognized by Moz and some of them are not. Why would a joomla plug in create canonicals incorrectly?

thoughts?