Canonical URL is absolute

canonical_absolute

Checks that the canonical URL is an absolute URL.

What does this rule check?

Canonical URLs must be absolute (including protocol and domain), not relative paths. Relative canonical URLs can be misinterpreted by search engines and fail to properly consolidate duplicate content signals.

Why is this important?

Relative canonical URLs may not resolve correctly across different contexts, leading to broken canonicalization and continued duplicate content issues.

How to fix

Change relative canonical URLs to absolute URLs including the full protocol and domain.

Examples

<link rel="canonical" href="/my-page" />
<!-- Relative URL - may not resolve correctly -->

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/my-page" />
<!-- Absolute URL - always resolves correctly -->

Agent fix snippet

Copy this snippet and paste it into your AI coding agent to fix this issue automatically.

Change the canonical tag to use an absolute URL:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourdomain.com/full-path" />

Always include the protocol (https://) and domain.