Rankelle

Canonical points at a redirect

This page's canonical tag names a URL that redirects somewhere else. Search engines have to follow the hop to find the real canonical, and may decide to ignore the tag instead.

How to fix it

Point the canonical at the URL the redirect lands on.

When it is not a problem

After a migration this appears everywhere at once and clears when the canonical template is updated. The page is not harmed in the meantime; the signal is just weaker than intended.

How Rankelle handles it

  • SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
  • DetectionDetected by comparing pages against each other after the crawl finishes, because no single page can show it on its own.
  • GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
  • LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
  • VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.

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