Many canonical warnings. Is this a problem?

[SamCUK]

My site has over 80 canonical warnings. The report states the url is for example http://www.musicliveuk.com and the 'tag value' column says http://www.musicliveuk.com/ Is that a good thing? I'm new to seo and am running my site on wordpress with all in one seo pack. Does this mean the seo pack has automatically added canonical tags to my pages? If so why is it showing as an error? I am also getting lots of 301 permanent redirects and I haven't set any up manually. I'm getting them for every page on my site from the normal url to a url with a slash at the end.

[Vahe.Arabian]

There's nothing wrong. The wordpress SEO pack is actually doing the right thing to ensure search engines like Google see only one version (and the right version) of your website, this being with the www.  with the /.

If your site didn't do what you had mentioned above, search engines would have indexed (listed) what they thought was the right version. There are also other several disadvantages to this:

(1) The page rank (domain authority) would be split between the www and non www versions of the site. Some would go even further and say that it would cause site duplication, which is not favoured by search engines.

(2) People linking to your site would not link to one URL version. Again this would cause spreading the link juice.

Since there are the proper 301 redirects on your site, no matter which version people link to, it will go back to the www version with the /. Just make sure that in Bing and Google Webmaster tools you also change your preferred domain settings to the www version.

Hope this helps,

Vahe

[wojkwasi]

Agree with Vahe. Also, warnings are not necessarily errors but meant to raise flags for you to check the site to see if everything is meant to be there.

An incorrect rollout of canonicals (e.g. if every page on your site has the home page as the canonical) can result in a lot of pages being removed out of the index.

Regarding the 301s, check all pages for links to other internal pages & look at any links that have a trailing slash at the end and change to remove the trailing slash, e.g. these are 2 different URLs:

• http://www.musicliveuk.com/category/planning-events
• http://www.musicliveuk.com/category/planning-events/

Yet "/category/planning-events/" 301s to "/category/planning-events"

The non www version 301s to the www version too.. so check if there are any internal links to:

• musicliveuk.com

and change to:

• www.musicliveuk.com

[SamCUK]

Thanks guys. I also get warnings that some pages have more than one canonical tag. I don't add any manually and just use the all in one seo pack settings. How can this be and how do I fix it?

[wojkwasi]

Do you have multiple SEO plugins running? Maybe the template has canonical settings out the box?

See lines 65 & 82on the home page.. there are 2.. I'm leaning towards template if I had to guess

[SamCUK]

Indeed I did have two plugins running... DOH!

Thanks guys.

[wojkwasi]

Pleasure