Only One Canonical URL Tag

[M-J-Smith]

HI, I'm an SEO novice - company owner with no money so doing it all myself with help from my web designer using wordpress.  Ive just completed some seo and done the moz page scoring analysis for optimisation and gained 92% - however - there is one outstanding issue on canonical url tags - i.e.

recommened fix = The canonical URL tag is intended to refer duplicate pages to a single canonical URL. To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, your page should use only one version of this tag in the header. See Canonical URL Tag - the Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

Ive gone through the page code and can see I have 2 rel=canonical references - am I able to simply delete one - how do I do this if its been created by the yoast/wordpress plug-in?

Many thanks in advance for any help!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

You could, but I would try to find out where the other one is coming from. Basically the second rel canonical tag will overwrite the first in most cases. So trying to find out how you delete one with keeping the right one would make most sense. You're at least on the right path!

Martijn.

[BlueprintMarketing]

you are correct you should only have one canonical tag on a page Max

Because you're using WordPress Yoast SEO plug-in I can tell you that it automatically adds canonical URL for you when you are modifying thing that should be pointing somewhere else you have to go into the advanced area in the photo below.

So all of these URLs would show the same content:

• http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/  you would want to point them all to the first URL  via canonical
• http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?isnt=it-awesome
• http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=twitter
• http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/?cmpgn=facebook

for more information on how to use that plug-in and remember only one per page and if the page is duplicate content pointed to the page that you want Google to assume is the owner of that content.

If you get stuck ask me or reference this below.

https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/

All the best,

Tom

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[M-J-Smith]

Hi Gents, thanks for your replies.

Tom - Ive looked in detail at both the canonical references in the header on my page at they both look the same -

Line 23 -

href='http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/' />

Line 133 –

href="http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/" />

the only difference I can see is the first one uses '...'  and the second one uses "..."

can you confirm if I should amend this in yoast or whether this is something that only moz is picking up as two different canonicals?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Look at your source code on these pages use command-F (on Mac) or control F (on PC) to search for the term "canonical" if you do not see it more than once on the page it should be no issue.

"the only difference I can see is the first one uses '...'  and the second one uses "..."

The canonical link? If there are two canonical bags on the same page make sure to remove the one that is not pointing to your preferred page or make sure the canonical is self-referencing. But make certain there are no more than one canonical tag like this below

Look for

Also, I would use

• https://www.deepcrawl.com/  allowing free site crawls right now
• and/or
• https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/  free up to 500 pages.

Just to confirm you do not have duplicate canonical's both tools will let you know for sure is will checking the source code of the page that is flagged.  if it does not have duplicates I would report it to The Moz they are awesome at getting back to you and answering these types of issues if there is in fact only one canonical per a page.

I hope that helps,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

I just checked the URL you referenced you have duplicate  canonical tags I checked it using  screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

please look at the data below.

You need to remove one of them you should only have one.

so instead of this

1. Canonical Link Element 1 http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/
2. Canonical Link Element 2 http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/

you get

1. Canonical Link Element 1 http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/

See

URL Encoded Address http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/
Content text/html; charset=UTF-8
Status Code 200
Status OK
Size 150645
Title 1 Bid Management / End-to-end Tendering Support
Meta Description 1 Professional Bid Management Consultants / Bid Solutions to Win Contracts / Everything You Need / Expert Advice on 07429 191305
H1-1 Bid Management
H2-1 Bid Management
H2-2 View More
Meta Robots 1 noodp
Canonical Link Element 1 http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/
Canonical Link Element 2 http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/
Word Count 723
Level 0
Inlinks 14
Outlinks 23

[BlueprintMarketing]

here is a CSV file showing the pages with more than one canonical you must make it so there's only one canonical per a page

here is the CSV

https://cl.ly/413X0m06282Q

Bigger photo http://i.imgur.com/cqcTN0h.png

<colgroup><col width="420"> <col width="184"> <col span="3" width="87"> <col width="199"> <col width="304"> <col span="3" width="87"></colgroup>
| Directives - Canonical |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |   |
| Address | Occurrences | Meta Robots 1 | X-Robots-Tag 1 | Meta Refresh 1 | Canonical Link Element 1 | Canonical Link Element 2 | HTTP Canonical | rel=“next” | rel=“prev” |
| http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/ | 3 | noodp |   |   | http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/ | http://www.completetenders.com/services/bid-management/ |   |   |   |
| http://www.completetenders.com/ | 2 | noodp |   |   | http://www.completetenders.com/ |   |   |   |   |
| http://www.completetenders.com/services/tendering-process/ | 3 | noodp |   |   | http://www.completetenders.com/services/tendering-process/ | http://www.completetenders.com/services/tendering-process/ |   |   |   |
| http://www.completetenders.com/services/tender-writing/ | 3 | noodp |   |   | http://www.completetenders.com/services/tender-writing/ | http://www.completetenders.com/services/tender-writing/ |   |   |   |
| http://www.completetenders.com/open-tenders/ | 2 | noodp |   |   | http://www.completetenders.com/open-tenders/ |   |   |   |   |

all the best,

Tom

cqcTN0h.png

[M-J-Smith]

HI Tom, thankyou very much for your help and information on this.  We have now investigated where the second canonical url was coming from and we found that the plugin we use to import the daily feed (RRS Post Importer) is also adding in it’s own canonical URL (as well as the yoast seo).  We are now going to look at switching in a different plug-in for this which will give us functionality to delete the rel-canonical reference, as the one we have doesn't enable you to do this.

Again, thanks for your help.

Kind regards

Matthew

[BlueprintMarketing]

You have an RSS feed that is adding a canonical to your own site?

RSS normally can add canonical's to third-party sites I don't think that the issue is Yoast I believe it is with the RSS post importer.

this is the second best SEO plugin you can use

https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

every decent word press seo  plugin will add canonical's you can choose to turn off canonical's on Yoast however I would do this using the RSS post importer

http://www.shoutpedia.com/how-to-remove-canonical-tagging-system-applied-by-yoasts-wordpress-seo-plugin/

In case your are using WordPress SEO plugin, you’ll have to add a filter in the functions.php file just before the closing of PHP as shown in the screenshot below.

See

http://i.imgur.com/cr7IU4W.jpg

Here is the exact code:
add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', '__return_false' );
It will disable canonical tags across the site and no page, no post and no archive will show this tag. But if you want to disable tagging function on certain posts, pages or category archives, you’ll have to use this code instead of the code mentioned above.
function wpseo_canonical_exclude( $canonical ) {global $post;if (is_single( '348' )) {$canonical = false;}return $canonical;}
As you know every post, page, category or any another archive has its own unique ID in the wordpress. So in the above example we used 348 which is the post ID for a specific post where the canonical tag will not show. If you don’t know how to find the ID, here is a good article for you. To hide this tag from multiple posts, use this code.
function wpseo_canonical_exclude( $canonical ) {global $post;is_single( array( 17, 19, 1, 11 ) ) {$canonical = false;}return $canonical;}

https://youtu.be/xG_XN4IFteE

I still strongly recommend that you keep the canonical on via plug-in and not via RSS there are too many things that it could miss and cause problems for you.

I hope this helps,

Tom

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[M-J-Smith]

hi thomas, yes - we are keeping the yoast plug-in but switching the rss feed plug-in to a different one that will enable us to switch off the canonical ref.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Smart move. Let me know if I can be of any more help then does this answer your question?