Comments on: How rel=canonical is Breaking Sites

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 21:47:45 +0000

Been there done that! I wondered why after a website redesign for a car dealer, why the website was not getting indexed?

Turns out the canonical was bad!

Another time with a large million page website, the canonical was set to point to the home page on every single inner page.

IT person did not understand canonical. Result was a huge drop that took months to recover from!

By: Adam Audette

Adam Audette — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:07:16 +0000

@J – we actually don’t care much about the SEO on our own site… too busy helping clients! It’s the old case of the “shoe cobbler’s children” if you know what I mean…

By: J

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 22:25:40 +0000

Just a quick question – why don’t you have canonical tag in your blog… just wondering?

By: Adam Audette

Adam Audette — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:43:19 +0000

@Eric – you would need a crawler for this. My company has crawling software that will allow for this, but it requires analysis because there isn’t an easy way for a machine to know when a canonical tag is ‘wrong’.

You might check out IIS SEO Toolkit, it does show excellent canonical information by URL, although I’m not sure on the specifics of its meta tag handling.

By: Eric

Eric — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:41:38 +0000

Hi everyone, I’m been scouring the web for a tool that will alert me if a canonical tag is added to my pages or if a canonical tag is being used incorrectly. Do you know of any such tools?

By: embarrassed anbd broke webmaster

embarrassed anbd broke webmaster — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:41:25 +0000

It took exactly 6 months to the day for my indexing issues with Google to resolve. I’d say the “penalty” for the wrong canonical tag works EXACTLY the same way that using the URL removal tool work(ed). It’s out of the index for 6 months before it’s re-crawled.

But that’s just a guess based on my only experience.

Traffic returned over the course of a few days just as it had disappeared, but only to about 80% of the pre-error level. Over the next 6 weeks the other 20% returned at a fairly consistent rate of about 4 or 5% per week….

80% loss in traffic was horrible — but it could have been worse. I had made just a handful of my tens of thousands of dynamic pages into static pages for performance reasons, so they weren’t affected. They were the most popular pages and generated substantial revenue and they carried me through with “just” a 50% loss in revenue.

Good luck to all others who have been bitten by this issue, or who have bitten themselves. However you prefer to look at it.

By: Tom Petryshen

Tom Petryshen — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 13:38:59 +0000

#38 – If the drop in G was entirely due to the canonical tag, you should have seen some recovery within a few weeks. Though I must admit using a canonical to a non existing page is not one I’ve heard until now.

Yes, setup a 301 from the non existent pages to the correct ones and then resubmit your XML to Google Webmaster Tools.

#39 – Delete your link in Webmaster Tools to the current XML sitemap. Leave it down for a few days and then re add it. I’d also recommend you chop your XML sitemap into smaller recognizable chunks (this will need to be automated) so that you can better determine what is and is not getting indexed.

If you don’t see the number climb in Webmaster Tools, there are likely other issues at play.

Cheers… tom @petryshen

By: Trevor Tessier

Trevor Tessier — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 19:49:19 +0000

With automated canonical plugins for WordPress and Joomla, do you have any knowledge about whether or not there are ones to avoid or ones that do the job right?

By: Osny Santos

Osny Santos — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:17:16 +0000

I made the same mistake.
I put canonical tag at all pages pointing to home page.
We’ve about 40.000 pages indexed at Google.
4 days after this wrong change, Google was indexing about 1.500 pages.
Oct. 12, I corrected the mistake but still with 1.500 pages at Google SERP.
I put “faster” at Crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools
I am waiting. Any suggestions?

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 10:45:11 +0000

I have also mucked up my canonical tags, and suffered a big drop in G traffic. I had pointed my canonicals to non existent pages.

I fixed the problem about 2 months ago and still no recovery.

Does anyone have any experience as to how long it might take to come back.

Should I set up 301 redirects for all those pages that don’t exist? pointing them back at the correct page?