rel canonical link query
Added some social media buttons to a site which required me to also add a rel="canonical" link to make things work. My SEO browser add-on is telling me that this is going to be an indexing problem. As the link is looping back to the same page is it just that the add-on is just seeing the link as a problem without knowing it purpose and all my work wont drop out of Google. Have used canonical only once before to solve a double index problem and am aware it can be a nightmare if it goes wrong.
Cheers
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I wish I could help you out with this but, I have no idea about canonical links. But, your post has given me some insight to a problem I am having on a client's site. So, I will be researching this, if I come up with anything that might be helpful to you I will PM you.
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Canonical links tell Google which page is the REAL page url that you want to index. Because there are many times query strings associated with a page that do not change the content, you want to set the canonical link as the true URL that you want to index. For example, the url: www.mydomain.com/mypage.html + some paramaters
An example of a common paramater is an affiliate link.
The page that you want to have indexed is www.mydomain.com/mypage.html without any extra paramaters So you would set the rel="canonical" as:
www.mydomain.com/mypage.html
Hope this helps.
Carson
Ok, so as the canonical link is set for the page it is on and in the format I want then in reality nothing should change.
Thanks
Yes, the canonical link simply tells Google that THE CURRENT page is what you want to index. If it finds other variations of the page elsewhere with query strings, or variables attached to the URL, then it'll always index the proper page without that stuff. You most likely will not have duplicate pages on your site so this will not be an issue.
Here is a live example for you:
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/rizzer/blog/rel-canonical-link-query#comment_300782
The above link includes a #comment_300782 on the URL so that when I click on it the page jumps to your reply. The Canonical link of this page is:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/rizzer/blog/rel-canonical-link-query/"/>
It tells google not to index the #comment_300782 part.
That is all canonical links do.
Thank you very much Carson, that's very good to know.
How do make part of your url in bold letters as Jay Was explaining in his webinar in customizing your meta title to get better Google rankings.
Can I have some help please? I still don't quite understand what I'm supposed to do with the canonical URL thingo.