Canonicals: Canonical Is Relative

Pages that have a relative rather than absolute rel=”canonical” link tag.

While the <link> tag, like many HTML tags, accepts both relative and absolute URLs, it’s easy to make subtle mistakes with relative paths that could cause indexing related issues.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Canonicals’ tab and ‘Canonical Is Relative’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Canonicals‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when pages use a relative rather than an absolute URL in the rel=”canonical” link tag.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/froggy/

Has the canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="/froggy/">

Rather than an absolute canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/froggy/">

How To Fix

Google recommend using absolute paths rather than relative paths for the rel=”canonical” link tag.