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Orphaned Canonical Pages

All pages referenced as a canonical page from another page, which are not linked from any other page discovered in the web crawl.

Priority: High

Impact: Negative

What issues it may cause​

Canonical tags help search engines to identify the most representative page (canonical) among a set of duplicate pages. If a canonical page is unlinked it may potentially cause the following issues:

  • Not giving the page any internal link authority sends mixed signals to search engines whether this is in fact the canonical page and may result in search engines ignoring the canonical suggestion.

  • If the canonical pages are not linked internally it minimises their internal authority and ultimately decreases their ability to rank in search results.

How do you fix it​

You can use DeepRank to assess if canonical tags are pointing to the correct pages. You may assume that the canonical page should be the URL with highest DeepRank and most backlinks.

  • If the canonical tags have been set correctly you should simply add internal links to these canonical pages.

  • if after a review you conclude that that the canonical tags are incorrect and these pages should not be marked as canonical you should correct the canonical tags linking to these pages to point to the correct canonical pages.

What is the positive impact​

Correctly configured canonical tags can help you to consolidate both internal as well as external link authority to your canonical pages increasing the chances for them to rank higher in search results page and drive more traffic and conversions.

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
            canonicalLinksInCount
            linksInCount
            foundInGoogleAnalytics
            foundInGoogleSearchConsole
            foundInBacklinks
            foundInList
            foundInLogSummary
            foundInWebCrawl
            foundInSitemap
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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