Canonical link on canonical url

[andyjsi]

This might seem a bit of an odd one, but we seem to be going around in circles on this when using the on page optimizer tool.

We have an ecommerce site (magento) which by default is putting a canonical link in the header on every product page.

For example;

www.example.com/product1.html has the

But when we run the on page optimiser tool, we're losing points on the critical section for not having canonical set correctly.

If we remove the tag, we get the tick and the a grade, but then further down the report we lose a tick for not using canonical links.

What are we missing here?

[Saijo.George]

I dont see why you need to rel canonical the page to itself .

I believe you can get in touch with the dev team here to get them to fix this issue .

[Dr-Pete]

A self-referencing canonical isn't necessary, in most cases, but it doesn't seem to cause any practical issues. I'm not sure why our tools are saying that your canonicals weren't set up correctly. We do have a notification if a canonical tag points to a different URL, but that's really just a heads up (in most cases, canonical tags will point to different URLs than the page their on). There's no good way to detect what page should be canonical, so our warnings are a little hyperactive in a few cases.

I would double-check that your internal links match your canonical URL - that's the biggest issue we see (inconsistent signals).

[andyjsi]

Thanks Guys,

Turns out it was an indexing issue on the website. Magento was being slow to rebuild the index after seo friendly urls changed - this made it appear as though the canonical link on the page was pointing to the wrong place.

We've re-run the tool after manually rebuilding the index and all is good.