Canonical in Moz crawl report
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I'm wondering if the moz bot is seeing my rel="canonical" on my pages. There are 2 notices that are bothering me:
- Overly Dynamic URL
- Rel Canonical
Overly Dynamic URL - This notice is being generated by urls with query strings. On the main page I have the rel="canonical" tag in the header. So every page with the query string has the canonical tag that points to the page that should be indexed. So my question...Why the notice? Isn't this being handled properly with the canonical tag? I know I can use my robots.txt or the tool in Google search console but is it really necessary when I have the canonical on every page?
Here is one of the links that has the "Overly Dynamic URL" notice, as you can see the the canonical in the header points to the page without the query string: https://www.vistex.com/services/training/traditional-classroom/registration-form/?values=true&course-title=DMP101 – Data Maintenance Pricing – Business Processes&date=March 14, 2016
Rel Canonical - Every page in my report has this notice "Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical". I'm using the rel="canonical" tag on all of my pages by default. Is the report suggesting that I don't do this? Or is it suggesting that I should? Again...why the notice?
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Hello!
Canonical tags do only tell which version of the URL a search engines should index but does not completely block access to the original URL being visited so we will still provide you a notice just in case it will be for a page that may need a new URL structure.
For the second part the tool is acknowledging the presence of a canonical tag.
These are both notices and not errors so there isn't anything you need to take action for unless you can identify a page that will need to be modified.
Hope this helps!
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The page is actually a Registration form that is flagged for not having a Meta Description. So if I give the page a meta description will all of my registration form pages with query string parameters be removed from the report? Or are notices still flagged as "Medium Priority"?