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OpportunitiesTechnicalSite IssuesCanonicalsInvalid Attribute In Annotation

Invalid Attribute In Annotation

What This Means

Pages with a rel=”canonical” annotation that includes an alternate version using an hreflang, lang, media, or type attribute. Adding certain attributes to the link element changes the meaning of the annotation to denote a different device or language version. These annotations are ignored and not used for canonicalisation by Google.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs include rel=”canonical” annotations with hreflang, lang, media, and type attributes. For example:

https://www.getasky.com/ Has the canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.getasky.com/" rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb"> The ‘rel=”alternate”‘ and ‘hreflang=”en-gb”‘ should obviously not be in the canonical annotation. It should be: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.getasky.com/">

How To Fix

Use separate appropriate link annotations to specify alternate versions of a page. Google supports explicit rel canonical link annotations and they should not contain hreflang, lang, media, and type attributes.


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