On-Page Report Card, rel canonical

[Breakout]

My site has the rel canonical tags set up for it.  The developers say that it is set up correctly.  Looking at the source code myself, it looks (to my untutored eyes) to be set up correctly.  However, on the On Page Report Card for every page I have checked, it says that it doesn't point to the right page.  I'd really like to change all my 'B's to 'A's, but I simply can't see what the issue is.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi James.  Lets say you have 15 pages that are the canonical pages and the 35 pages that are variations (alphabetically sorted, price sorted, whatnot). If those non-canonical 35 pages are being graded they're not going to have a rel=canonical that lines up because they're not the canonical page. The on page report card is only looking to match the URL you entered into the SEOmoz system and the tag that you have on your page. Is that what's happening in your situation?

I doubt it, but just in case you missed it, the explanation from On Page Report Card: 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.

[Breakout]

Let's say that I sell golfing supplies and have the category "9-Irons".  On that category page, the source code would say:

<link rel="canonical" href="[/category/9-Irons](view-source:http://www.breakoutbras.com/category/Nursing-Bras)" />

If I enter the keyword "9 Irons" into SEOmoz, and put the URL as:

http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons

I get dinged for having the wrong canonical reference.

[RyanPurkey]

Trying making the absolute URL, i.e. "http://www.mysite.com/category/9-Irons" as your href instead of "/category/9-Irons" in the rel="canonical" link tag.

[Breakout]

1.  I'm not sure how I would do that, so I would have to get the developers to do it.

2.  I'm not sure if that would fix the issue

3.  While it would be nice to have 'A's showing for the report cards, it isn't really essential if there isn't really a problem - and if this IS what is causing us to get dinged I'm not sure that it is truly a problem on my site, or just a limitation in the 'report card'.

[ninjamarketer]

Hey James,

Not sure exactly how your site is organized but it seems like you should be able to resolve the issue using 301 direction instead of rel canonicals.

Sameer

[RyanPurkey]

It's in the code so your developer would have to do it, from Google's Guide:

Can the link be relative or absolute?

The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

[Breakout]

Thanks Ryan.  So apparently it is OK to have relative links, as long as they are done correctly.  My developers insist that they HAVE done them correctly, but SEOmoz flags it anyway because for all it knows, the base link may not have been set to the right location.  I'm going to see if I can get the URLs changed to absolute.