All Collections
WUX Overview
Cross-domain Canonicals
Cross-domain Canonicals

What are cross-domain canonicals, why are they bad and how to fix them.

Florian avatar
Written by Florian
Updated over a week ago

What is the issue?

A cross domain canonical instructs search engines to consider a URL from another domain as the original publisher of content, which is useful if you wish to publish articles but provide credit to another site. This report includes all pages where the canonical has a different domain, subdomain or protocol (http / https). If unintentional, a cross-domain canonical could harm your rankings and give your competitor an advantage.

How to fix

Ensure that all canonicals on your website point to another URL on your own website. Under the "documents" list in the report below, you can see which pages contain a cross domain canonical. The "canonical targets" list shows you the page referred to in the canonical tag. If these cross domain canonicals have been set unintentionally, you can simply download the report, log in to your content management system, and work through the documents one by one to change the canonical tag, or pass the list on to your developers. Learn more about this in our wiki and magazine.

Did this answer your question?