Due to some search engine canonical issues (www.site.com, site.com, https://www.site.com), a few days ago I added a rel="canonical" to my homepage - www.cprclass.org. I used the canonical tag due to some URL issues I couldn't correct with a 301/htaccess. I noticed a jump to number 1 on the SERPs for our site's main keywords, but yesterday and today, we seem to have dropped from our number 1 spot. But these are showing old caches so it may just be normal SE behavior... My main concern, however, is that I'm wondering if the rel="canonical" is an issue for us for Bing/Yahoo. I just put it on our homepage as: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.cprclass.org/" /> What we were showing under the results for our canonical before and today (not the brief time we were number 1) was/is: https://www.cprclass.org and http://cprclass.org. Finally, what is with the https://www.cprclass.org? I've never used or been linked to from that address before... Any thoughts are more than appreciated.
Does that affect your search engine rankings too and how much money you make online? I ask because I am new to all of this stuff, and is trying to soak up as much knowledge as I can from others. So please pardon me for asking, but I'm just trying to learn a lil' sumptin sumptin from you my friend =)
Yes, it affects everything - especially considering the website's traffic is primarily done online. I'm not sure about the canonical rel tag so far, but I'm cautious about it because I've looked at other forum posts without much information directly relating to my issue. The closest example was Dr. Pete's (SEOMOZ) example for site-wide canonical tag.
Bing and Yahoo only use rel=canonical as a "suggestion" to look elsewhere, and will only start giving the canonical link priority when combined with other factors. I would delete the https//cprclass link you've posted here as a start to lower its authority.