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Pages without Valid Canonical Tag

All indexable pages which are missing a canonical tag, or with conflicting canonical URLs in the HTTP header and HTML head.

Priority: Medium

Impact: Negative

What issues it may cause​

A canonical tag should be included on every page to prevent duplication issues caused where a page can be served by multiple URLs.

If a page contains 2 different canonical URLs, or if the canonical is not in the HTML head, they are likely to be ignored by search engines and the canonical will be reported as missing.

How do you fix it​

A canonical tag should be added to the HTML head of every URL. The canonical URL format should be designed to exclude URL parameters which do not change the content.

If the canonical tag is in the body, the HTML head should be reviewed to determine if this is caused by a body tag prematurely closing the HTML head. The canonical tag can be placed above any body only HTML tags.

What is the positive impact​

The canonical tag suggestion can be processed by search engines, allowing link authority signals to be aggregated to the canonical URL.

Applying a canonical tag to the non-canonical URLs may result in them being crawled less frequently, improved the site's crawling efficiency which means that search engines can discover, index and/or update your important pages faster and more frequently.

How to fetch the data for this report template​

You will need to run a crawl for report template to generate report. When report has been generated and you have crawl id you can fetch data for the report using the following query:

query GetReportForCrawl($crawlId: ObjectID!, $reportTemplateCode: String!) {
  getCrawl(id: $crawlId) {
    reportsByCode(
      input: {
        reportTypeCodes: Basic
        reportTemplateCodes: [$reportTemplateCode]
      }
    ) {
      rows {
        nodes {
          ... on CrawlUrls {
            pageTitle
            url
            description
            foundAtUrl
            deeprank
            level
            canonicalUrl
            canonicalHeaderUrl
            canonicalHtmlUrl
            foundInGoogleAnalytics
            foundInGoogleSearchConsole
            foundInBacklinks
            foundInList
            foundInLogSummary
            foundInWebCrawl
            foundInSitemap
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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