Comments on: Canonical Link Element Mistakes

By: Why isn't your Webpage being Indexed in Google | Internet Marketing Belfast - Michael Wall

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:43:11 +0000

[...] checked the source code in the browser for non index elements, checked for any canonical mistakes, checked the history of the site to see if the site had been black listed, but couldn’t [...]

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 [...]