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[SmartCrawl Pro] Canonincal tags edited on each page using Smarcrawl Pro

Hi, a Moz crawl of my site identified that I had missing canonical tags on every page. I’d like to have manual control over the canonicals as I’m planning to create some new pages which will contain duplicate content. So, I manually edited the canonical tags for each of my site’s pages in the advanced tab of the Smartcrawl Pro page edit menu, and then marked the issue as resolved in my Moz dashboard. However, Moz re-crawled my site yesterday, and it still flags missing canonical tags on each page. I rechecked this on the advanced section of Smartcrawl Pro’s individual page menu, and this shows a cononical tag for each page. It looks like Moz can’t see these tags?

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 9:32:14
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Neil

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    I checked the site and those canonical link tags weren’t in fact injected to pages so Moz couldn’t see them.

    For now, I’ve turned the “Hide redundant canonical link tags” option in SmartCrawl settings off (“SmartCrawl -> Settings -> General Settings”:wink: and they are now added so if you re-scan with Moz it should detect them, though you might need to clear cache.

    However, it’s not quite how it works. There’s no need to keep canonical links set like this, when they are pointing to the pages they are on – that is actually redundant and doesn’t do anything (neither good or bad so it doesn’t make a difference if they are there).

    If there are duplicated-content page then it’s something that should be there but in a bit different way. For example:

    domain.com <- homepage
    domain.com/post1 <- some post with unique content
    domain.com/post2 <- some post with duplicated content but this post is the “original one”
    domain.com/post3 <- some post with duplicated content – same as in /post2 – but this one is an actual copy

    With such content structure

    domain.com -> no need for canonical at all
    domain.com/post1 -> no need for canonical at all
    domain.com/post2 -> doesn’t need canonical either
    domain.com/post3 -> needs canonical, URL being “domain.com/post2” (so pointing to the “original” post.

    Other than this – pages that don’t contain duplicated content or are “originals” of such content don’t need canonical pointing to themselves, though it won’t also “hurt”.

    The exception, when canonical pointing to the same page it’s on could be useful, would be if site is available via both “www” and “non-www” domain without any redirect (so e.g. “www.domain.com” doesn’t redirect to “domain.com”:wink: and/or via both HTTP and HTTPS without any redirect. But these are quite rare cases nowadays and I would rather recommend setting a redirect for those anyway.

    Best regards,
    Adam