Thanks Dirk for your great in-depth response!

I will now check with developers what the estimated effort would be. Making the canonical URL available will let me sleep better at night before releasing the new site version.
I think the risk shouldn't be huge if we cannot do this and will not waste too many ressources on this (unless, of course, we see a negative impact, which I will then report here;)

Best, 
Phil

Thank you Dirk!
I did look at the article you pointed out, but could not initially find that information:
"Double-check that your rel=canonical target exists (it’s not an error or “soft 404”)"

However, for me this is not 100% conclusive. The page does exist, in a way, but it's redirected. I know that to be on the safe side, we should better make it available. But as it would mean a lot of additional programming effort, I am trying to find out if it really is necessary. Thats' why I was hoping someone already has some experience with this...

Hi

We have a website selling cellphones. They are available in different colors and with various data capacity, which slightly changes the URL.

For instance:

• Black iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(black,16,000000000010204783).html
• White iphone, 16GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,16,000000000010204783).html
• White iphone, 24GB: www.site.com/iphone(white,24,000000000010204783).html

Now, the canonical URL indicates a standard URL:

But this URL is never physically available. Instead, a user gets 301 redirected to one of the above URLs. Is this a problem? Does a URL have to be "physically" available if it is indicated as canonical?

Errors indicated in Webmaster Tools are often inaccurate. Unfortunately, there is not much else to do than manually go through the errors and see for yourself whether there actually are problems. Maybe you want to compare indications in Webm.-Tools with other crawlers (such as Open Site Explorer).

Hi Alec

Depending on what your website is about, I usually find it best to get links from partners and cooperators. Is someone distributing or using your product? Try to get them to state this on their site! Anyone you regularly cooperate with? Make sure they will say so on their site.
Careful not to overdo it with the link. Take it easy, create links step by step and don't get too many at once...

Hi Peter

I think you should be fine. Redirecting old URLs that no longer exist is a best practice and helpful for users. Of course, those 301'd URLs should drop out of Google's index after a while. But this should be okay. You only want URLs to appear in SERPs that actually do have content.

It's still there, but hidden a bit. Enter the first domain in the field and on the left side a navigation will appear including "Compare Link Metrics", where you can compare multiple domains.

It's still available, but I wonder as well why MOZ hid it like that...

Good point with the backlinks! Currently, both robots.txt files are open and google does not seem to have canonicalization problems so far. So it makes sense to leave it this way anyways... Thanks Thomas!

We recently changed our domain from http to https. When a user enters any URL on http, there is an global 301 redirect to the same page on https.

I cannot find instructions about what to do with robots.txt. Now that https is the canonical version, should I block the http-Version with robots.txt?

Strangely, I cannot find a single ressource about this...

Yes, I think the crucial point is that addressing googlebot wouldn't resolve the specific problem I have here.

I would have tried adressing googlebot otherwise. But to be honest, I wouldn't have expected a much different result than specifying all user agents. Googlebot should be part of that exclusion in any case.

100 points for you Martijn, thanks! I'm pretty sure you've found the problem and I'll go about fixing it. Gotta get used to having https used more frequently now...

Hi

This subdomain has about 4'000 URLs indexed in Google, although it's blocked via robots.txt: https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch&oq=site%3Awww1.swisscom.ch

This has been the case for almost a year now, and it does not look like Google tends to respect the blocking in http://www1.swisscom.ch/robots.txt

Any clues why this is or what I could do to resolve it?

Thanks!

Well, if Moz is able to find such URLs, these dynamic versions are linked-to from somewhere in your content. This is still not optimal, even if you use rel=canonical. If you can find the source and change these URLs to a non-dynamic version, this will still be better. Otherwise just ignore the warning in the report...

Cool, I'd be interested in the outcome! Let us know how it went:)

Same here, the US often generates the largest traffic on english sites because there are many more users in the US... But the fact that those are all direct users is strange and might be a bug. Sometimes traffic is shown as direct, even though it's referred from other pages or even search engines.

Sure, if you have a developer that can set it up with a nice design, WP is also good from an seo standpoint!

Yes, but he also said that people are not usually named "Buy cosmetic online". That's just plain spammy.

There is no SEO advantage to this IMO. Just plain

Header

will do.

I suggest to add the m.abc.com Domain to a mobile Sitemap if you can do it. It's not an important requirement - particularly if you already have a normal XML sitemap and use rel=alternate. But if you can additionally create the mobile sitemap without much effort, why not.

Oh yes true, now I see it. You linked to it 21 times, so actually this now looks like you linked too much!

But like you've said, I think relevance is key. Try to add a little bit of content to the CPU page. A quick unique description of it or so. See if that helps. I guess you might have to test a few different approaches to see which ones work. This is actually a really interesting case.