Comments on: Canonical Link Element Mistakes

By: How to Kill your Search Engine Rankings | Internet Marketing Belfast - Michael Wall

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:58:10 +0000

[...] given priority and the site was de-indexed. Arguably when there a conflict’s and an obvious indexing mistake has been made Google should ignore both directives and include all pages in it’s [...]

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:00:19 +0000

Guys thanks for dropping by, certainly looks like it’s needs a bit of fine tuning. I’ll maybe test this out again.

By: searchbrat

searchbrat — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:28:59 +0000

I have the same experience as Jono, I have seen it not be very effective at removing duplicate content. Interesting to see it behaving in this way.

By: Jono Alderson

Jono Alderson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:06:21 +0000

Ooh, fascinating. I’ve seen reports of the tag failing miserably to de-index duplicate content caused by strings of parameters, but this is the first I’ve heard about it being over-effective when implemented incorrectly. Nice find!

By: Ricardo

Ricardo — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:21:45 +0000

Hi Mr Wall,

I saw the exact same situation a few months back where a webmaster mistakenly placed the canonical element on his home page (site had several hundred pages – not badly ranked either) and the other pages started getting removed from the index rather rapidly.

i.e. he placed “http://his-home-page.com/” as the canonical element on every page (by mistake).

If I recall correctly, about 50 (perhaps more – I’m quite foggy on the number and don’t want to exaggerate) were removed from google’s index completely within a few days.

He had no choice but to simply wait for his site to be recrawled after that error.

Regards,
Ricardo

By: Interesting Case Study on rel=canonical Tag – Google Fail - Red Cardinal

Interesting Case Study on rel=canonical Tag – Google Fail - Red Cardinal — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 07:49:05 +0000

[...] future updates. You can also subscribe to email updates.Michael Wall has written about a short test he ran on a small site using the rel=canonical tag. Very interesting, and certainly one test does not a trend make, but I’d have expected more [...]