SEO, Duplicated pages and Canonical Missing

Hi,

I’ve built my site with no website knowledge but I’m having a few problems with the SEO with my site www.wagonwheels.tv. I’ve run the website through an SEO performance checker online called Sitechecker - which gives it a performance of 85 out of 100 which is not bad. What it does see is 3 main page duplicates which are:-
https://www.wagonwheels.tv/index.html

Not too sure if its something I’ve done or something that Blocs has done.

The second problem is ‘Canonical is missing: 28 pages’ - What is this in simple terms?

Technically you get to choose the canonical url, though Google is auto selecting nowadays if you don’t make a choice I believe. It’s basically all down to avoiding those repeat urls you are seeing that weaken seo.

If you were using clean urls, which I recommend, your canonical links would be like this <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wagonwheels.tv/"/> or <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wagonwheelst.v/about/"/>

You are not using clean urls, so it would be the full url in the href part. I suspect this will fix your problem and it simply goes in the page header using the add code button.

Hi, thanks for that. I’ve changed the site to now clean urls so it will probably take a little while for google to see these. Do I need to do anything with the old pages (HTML), give them a redirect etc?
So with the canonicals do I need to just put this on each page - ??
Thanks

Steve

You should really set up a 301 redirect via htaccess that always sends you to the same url as listed in the canonical data.

Now you talking proper web stuff!!! Were would I set up 301 directs?

With the canonicals do i just put this on each page? <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wagonwheels.tv/"/>

That has to be done inside the .htaccess file on the server with an entry for each page along these lines Redirect 301 /about.php https://www.wagonwheels.tv/about/

You might find it easier looking at the redirects option inside the control panel of your web host and try it out that way.

Yes for the canonical data you want one on each page, but it has to be tailored to each page e.g <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wagonwheels.tv/about/"/> or <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.wagonwheels.tv/rental/"/>