Rel Canonical tag using Wordpress SEO plugin

[NicDale]

Hi team

I hope this is the right forum for asking this question.

I have a site http://hurunuivillage.com built on Wordpress 3.5.1 using a child theme on Genesis 1.9.  We're using Joost's Wordpress SEO plugin and I thought it was configured correctly but the Crawl Diagnostics report has identified an issue with the Rel Canonical tag on the sites pages.

I have not edited the plugin settings so am surprised the SEOMoz Crawl has picked up a problem.

Example:

Page URL is http://hurunuivillage.com/

Tag Value http://hurunuivillage.com/  (exactly the same)

Page Authority 39

Linking Root Domains 23

Source Code

Considering the popularity of the plugin I'm surprised I have not been able to find tutorials to find what I'm doing wrong or should be doing better.

Thanks in advance.

Best

Nic

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Your canonicals looks all good to me, I wouldn't worry about it.

[NicDale]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Because the install is "out-of-the-box" I expected they were right. 
What is SEOMoz trying to tell me about the tags?

[mememax]

Maybe SEOMoz crawl has encountered a problem with your self-canonical tags. As Oleg told you, you don't have any issue with your canonical tags, it's just a matter of personal opinion to use self canonicals or not.

If you're afraid of possible scraper re-publishing your content and if you use url-based user sessions it may be worthwhile to have. But it doesn't hurt in any way.

[TextMarketing]

SEOmoz alerts you because they're not really needed. They will not hurt you.

[ThompsonPaul]

Unfortunately, Nic, the SEOMoz tool does a really bad job of explaining that the Notices section of the on-page reports does NOT mean those areas have problems. The tool is simply informing you that those specific elements appear on your website. It is then up to you to decide whether they're appropriate or not. (The exact wording is "Notices are interesting facts about your pages we found while crawling". Pretty vague)

In the case of the canonical URLs, they're definitely a good thing and as neither you nor Oleg see any problems with them, all is fine.

As an example, that Notices section would also tell you if it found no-follow tags. If those had been added accidentally, they could be disastrous, so having the tool tell you they exist could warn you that someone had made a mistake. Or it could simply be that you put them in place on purpose. See? Judgement call.

Hope that helps;

Paul

[NicDale]

I appreciate all your responses.

Paul, thanks for your detailed reply.

Best

Nic