Comments on: How rel=canonical is Breaking Sites

By: Arnaud

Arnaud — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:56:49 +0000

Hello,
I’ve got a big problem with canonical link,

on a product page, I’ve got a “sort by” tool, with an url parameter, so I’ve put a canonical link to point to the url without any ’sortby’ parameter,

In GWT, I’ve got 17000 duplicate titles errors , with the 2 pages: with and without the ’sortby’ parameter !
Example :
http://www.meilleurmobile.com/.....tDrillDown
and
http://www.meilleurmobile.com/.....Simplicime

containing the tag

Have I done anything wrong , or is it a major GWT bug ?

Thanks for help !

- Arnaud

By: admin@technofreaky

admin@technofreaky — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:30:43 +0000

I am also confused with this tag, the all in seo plugin in wordpress automatically creates canonical url of all the urls of the post. I wonder if this creates some problem.?

By: blogstalk

blogstalk — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:25:18 +0000

What is the best way to handle canonical links on a blog site that shows recent posts on the home page and duplicates that content on pages dedicated to individual blog posts? For http://blogstalk.com, I am using only canonical links on the individual post pages, but I don’t have any on the home page. I refrain from putting them there, because I have only seen one canonical link per page on the examples that I have encountered. Is it possible to put multiple canonical links to specify that the individual post pages are the ones that should be canonicalized?

By: @petryshen

@petryshen — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:50:37 +0000

Correct Adam. The error was spotted 3 weeks after implementation during some random tests. Thankfully, we were able to reverse the slide quickly after cleanup (we also made some minor content changes and resubmitted the XML sitemaps). Within a week had gained back over 70% of the pages. Within two weeks, the pages and and traffic returned to pre error levels.

By: embarrassed anbd broke webmaster

embarrassed anbd broke webmaster — Fri, 14 May 2010 22:58:33 +0000

@petryshen — how long ago was that and do you recall how long it took to recover?

(My guess is that within 2 weeks the pages started disappearing from the index and that they were gone within 7 more days)

By: Adam Audette

Adam Audette — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:47:38 +0000

Good points @petryshen and a scary tale you tell about the noindex oversight. Education always helps.

By: @petryshen

@petryshen — Fri, 14 May 2010 06:01:26 +0000

The same is true can be said about any tag/code that does not affect how the page is rendered. We have a client in the classified space that inherently migrated 1.5 millions plus pages from staging to the live environment with a Meta Robots NOINDEX tag intact (they added it to the staging environment as an extra precaution). You ever wonder how long it takes to drop a half million pages from the index?

In the end it comes down to having proper procedures in place at the ground level. The developers and engineers need to be educated, supported and provided with the tools to ensure these simple, but catastrophic errors do not happen.

We put together a SEO course specifically for engineers by engineers that has helped tremendously.

By: embarrassed anbd broke webmaster

embarrassed anbd broke webmaster — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 07:27:44 +0000

I’m embarrassed to say I did the exact same thing. A coding error pointed the cononical to the home page for every single one of my 20,000 plus pages. Traffic from Google dropped by 80% from 10-12k visitors to 2-3k. :(

Now the canonical is pointing to itself. Traffic has not returned so far — this has been 2 months to date.

By: Alysson

Alysson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:10:45 +0000

The ease with which this tag can be implemented by amateurs has been among many concerns about rel=canonical from the beginning. I hope people take your advice to heart and realize that not using it at all is a far better option than using it improperly.

I always advise those who bring up the subject of the rel=canonical tag that if they don’t understand how to use 301 redirects properly, they shouldn’t even consider implementing the rel=canonical tag. It isn’t something to be taken lightly. It must be approached with a very specific strategy and a full understanding of why it’s being done, what it does and what using it will accomplish.

It’s not the “quick fix” solution for correcting the problems site owners have avoided fixing previously - either because it was too time consuming or troublesome to do it right in the first place. It’s putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound and I’m not surprised so many mistakes are being made implementing it.

By the way, I agree with Bob - the redundancy and superfluousness of including rel=canonical on all pages only to incorporate the actual page URL is apparent. I questioned the purpose of it when it was incorporated into the All-in-One-SEO and Platinum SEO plugins, and again when the standalone Canonical URLs plugin was introduced.

If any of them allowed you to specify the canonical URL for the page, rather than simply adding the tag with the actual URL of the page, I might be able see a use for it. Without that functionality, there’s no constructive purpose that I can see to using the rel=canonical tags generated automatically by any of the plugins.

There’s my two cents…okay, more like 25 cents.

By: gavin

gavin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:58:17 +0000

Adam — I had to respond to #8 up there

Not exactly a “search engine supported” tag, but one that breaks websites all the time?… \…or should I say…breaks their Search Agent Compatibility?

Anyway, I couldn’t agree more that some things (like the canonical tag) should only be handled by a trained professional (of course, I also believe that WYSIWYG is the worst thing to ever happen to the internet) — but the (in)visibility (or lack thereof) of implementation (or an implementation fail) points to the odd circumstance that internet-delivered content is still evaluated by all but maybe a handful of SEOs (and people using screen readers) based on purely visual criteria.

Long story short - it’s too bad it’s forever amateur hour on the internet, and that every epic fail doesn’t automatically add p {text-decoration: blink;} to an offending website’s stylesheet…