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i thought they were supposed to be , see mozon page grader advice:

Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today.

Recommendation: Add a canonical URL tag referencing this URL to the header of the page.

Thanks for commenting Federico !

Could well be although i don't know for sure - Many of them are to a login page from an 'account/destination/forum' type of url so i presume thats whats happening, needing to redirect temporarily to login, in most of the instances where 302 re-directing to a login page, and hence 302 is correct usage in these instances ?

I take it this means that the page in question has been referenced via a different pages canonical tag but that the page in question itself does not have a self referencing canonical tag (and that it should do)

cheers

dan

Hi

Whilst i appreciate its best practice to 301 redirect permanently moved pages, what if the page is say a login page or other page you not really interested in ranking or transferring juice to ? is it still important/best practice to do so simply because the page has permanently moved hence should still be a 301 even though you don't really want it to rank ?

cheers

dan

Why is the dupe content info showing in errors and not warnings ?

Since if dupe content can get your site penalised (as per Panda) or worse banned, surely it should be in that section of reports ?

Cheers
Dan

thanks Paddy !

Thanks Chaps !!

Have a great weekend

CHeers

Dan

Hi

If you have 404 errors for pages that you dont have similar content pages to 301 them to, should you just leave them (the 404's are optimised/qood quality with related links & branding etc) and they will eventually be de-indexed since no longer exist or should you 'remove url' in GWT ?

Cheers

Dan

Hi

Moz has completed a crawl for a site i'm working on which also has a development area (hence with lots of dupe content) on a sub domain (and this dev area hasn't been hidden from crawlers via password, robots, gwt etc etc).

Moz dupe content report is not showing any of these urls though even though my campaign setting is on 'root' domain so i would have thought report should be listing the subdomain urls as dupe content (because they are dupe content).

Any ideas ?

Cheers

Dan

Hi

Can the Hosting location of image files have a negative effect if 'off-site' such as if they are on the developers own media server ?  As opposed to on the actual websites server or file structure ?

In the case i'm looking at the image files are hosted on a totally separate server (a media subdomain of the developers site server) from the subject sites dedicated server.

Will engines still attribute the properties of files hosted in this manner to the main website (such as file name, alt attributes, etc etc) ? Or should they really be on the subject sites server own media folder ?

Cheers

Dan

I'm about to issue these instructions would appreciate it if you could quickly confirm covers your advice correctly and nothing missing:

1) Setup a completely different GWT account unrelated to the main site, so that there is a new GWT account specific to the staging subdomain
2) Add a robots.txt on the staging area subdomain site that disallows all pages and all crawlers OR use the noindex meta tag on all pages.  Its obviously very important when you update the main site it DOES NOTinclude or push out these files too (since that would result in main site or pages being de-indexed)3) Request removal of all pages in GWT.  Leave the form blank for the page to be removed since this will remove the entire site4) After about 1 month (or you see that the pages are all out of the serps), and google has spidered and seen the robots.txt, then put up a password on the entire staging site.Note:For brand new sites staging areas that don't yet exist or exist but are new and not yet showing up in the index then simply add a password for human access to prevent the above process being required in the future.

Thanks for clarifying that CleverPHD & thanks again for all your help and great advice

Have a great weekend !!

All Best

Dan

thanks !

as er my last question theres no risk of accidentally taking out the main site as part of this process ?

cheers

dan

Thanks so much for that great advice

just a bit worried about accidentally getting main site removed by accident, i take it so long as its a brand new GWT account for that specific subdomain then this cant happen ?

Cheers

Dan

Thanks Anthony,

The staging area already exists and is indexable as far as i can tell

So i need to tell developers to  exclude crawling via robots.txt, add a no-index tag to head of each page but keep it followed so still crawlable i.e. within the Head section of every page on the dev area

OR alternatively just remove urls from GWT)

If excluding crawling via robots.txt file then why do you need to add a noindex tag to each page too, surely the robots.txt deals with this situation ?

cheers

dan

Hi

I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ?

Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ?

In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ?

Cheers

Dan

Hi

Im looking at a clients site canonicalisation usage and in regard to some comments the tags referential value is a node (not the same as the actual page url) does this make sense or sounds like incorrect usage ?

For example:

URL  **                                                     ** Canonical Tag

domain.com/comment/6                          domain.com/node/21

Cheers

Dan

I would have thought if that were the case would effect the other partial match variation rankings too, which it hasnt since all others are still on page 1 !

The kw in question (along with the other kw still ranking on page 1) are partially matched with the domain

Thanks for taking the time to comment Carson

One of the reasons friend/client has hired me to look into this is because he cant retrieve any link data from GWT. Have asked him to check messages and new manual notifications too.

If Panda surely probs would be site wide not kw/page specific ?  Its the HP thats dropped for a primary target kw when all other similar kw rankings for hp are still page 1

Also interestingly there is link growth spike of aprox 1200 backlinks (but only an increase of 4 domains) over 3 days according to MajesticSEO although hrefs reports a link & ref domain drop over same period, any idea which is the most accurate/trustworthy data since directly contradictory date, one of those data sources must be WAY off the mark !?

cheers

dan

Panda would be site wide not kw specific !

It was the HP

there is link growth of aprox 1200 backlinks (but only an increase of 4 domains) over 3 days according to MajesticSEO (although hrefs reports a link & ref domain drop over same period)