Rel Canonical ? please help

[Chris__Chris]

Can some one please answer a question for me, I have a crawl error stating that I have

• [#### Rel Canonical

  326](http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns/243472/issues/18)

Can you please advise me on how serious these Errors are?

I was told by one person not to worry but It seems far to many to me.

thanks

[ske11]

Hi

If I understand your issue correctly you have run a SEOmoz campaign and one of the things it has picked up are 326 Rel canonical issues highlighted in the blue notices section.

If this is correct then you should have nothing to worry about as it is just informing you that the Rel canonical tag has been used 326 times on the site.

The Rel canonical tag is used to indicate to the search engines that you are aware of 2 or more pages with similar content and that they should take more notice of the one you indicate the Canonical tag looks like

This needs to be added to the header of every page that is a copy (or near copy) of the main page you with to promote.

So if you have a number of pages that are similar to each other you want the Rel canonical in place. Some CMS automatically add Rel Canonical tags to every page and this may be what is happening. I am happy to look at the site for you to determine if the Canonical tags are set correctly if that would help.

Sean

[Alex-Harford]

It's not an error, just a 'crawl notice'. Canonical's can be problematic if used incorrectly though, more information here:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization 

[Chris__Chris]

Please could you have a look, I am worrying about the fact that we lost one of our main ranking keywords from page 1 to page nothing" We did accidently remove the site after a huge blip about 4 months ago and since we upgraded wordpress.. Just seems odd thanks

[ske11]

Hi Chris

I have sent you a PM asking for the URL of the site so I can check it for you

Sean