Canonical tag in the Michael Torbert SEO plugin

[BridgetGibbons]

I am confused about a canonical tag that appears in the header section of a site that uses the WordPress All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbert. That is a very popular one.

It says,

I thought that telling Google that a page is canonical means "Don't index this one, it is not the primary page." But in fact, this is the primary page because when you go to www.xquisitevents.com it redirects to xquisitevents.com.

Is this done properly or not?

Ditto for all the other pages, i.e. xquisitevents.com/about-us has a canonical tag in the wordpress plugin, etc.

Which is the real primary page? And does the primary page correctly have the canonical tag in the plugin?

[bradwayland]

I think your point is valid here.  I think we need to break down canonical a bit for this one to make sense.  The canonical tag is not a redirect.  It is a suggestion, not a directive.  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

In this case you are correct.  The site owner is telling Google that he wants the www version to be displayed in Google SERPs.  And if you go and search for xquisite events you will find that the first several results are using the www just like he requested.  What is strange here is that the site owner has a 301 redirect pointing the www to the non.  It seems to me that the site owner accidentally used the canonical on the wrong page.  Instead of placing it on the pages he did not want to be primarily indexed he did the inverse.

Based on his redirects his REAL primary pages are non www but his canonical usage is suggesting the opposite.  Hope this helps.