Google has completely delisted us. We were a fist page search term for years before that. A cryptic message in Bing webmaster says that our issue is with canonical urls. Any tips or suggestions? Rick at TMLfans.ca
Here's the error message: Large number of pages pointing to the same canonical URL for domain tmlfans.ca Date: 2013-02-27 Priority: Normal Canonical tags can be used to help de-dupe URLs for pages with the same or very similar content. Bing has detected that your site is using what appears to be the same canonical URL for a large number of pages that are not the same. This may be indicative of a problem with your HTML template, content publishing system, or site code. You should review the source of your pages and check if the URLs used inside the <link rel="canonical" href="<url>" /> are not accidentally pointing to the same location for all (or too many) pages.
Hey Rick, how's it going? Are you sure you actually need to use the rel canonical tag in the first place? You don't seem to have much in the way of dup content from what I can see? To be honest, if I were you I'd prob just remove the tag altogether. You seem to have it active on every page on the site, but I really cant see why you'd need it. I'd be tempted to do away with it completely and see how your rankings improve after that. If you've had a message through in Google webmaster tools too then that would indicate manual action, so be sure to file a reinclusion request once you have implemented the changes. Hope that helps mate!