canonical.relative

What to change

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on every SEO audit: of a page, a crawl, a build directory or HTML. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check audit https://example.com --rule canonical.relative

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_audit_page:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "canonical.relative"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable canonical.relative on the command, or disableRules: ["canonical.relative"] to a tool.

• Warningcanonical.missingNo <link rel="canonical"> is present.
• Errorcanonical.header-conflictThe HTTP Link header names a different canonical URL than the page's <link rel="canonical">, or names more than one.
• Errorcanonical.multipleMore than one canonical link is present. When they disagree, search engines ignore all of them.
• Errorcanonical.invalidThe canonical href is empty or cannot be resolved to an http(s) URL.
• Warningcanonical.protocol-mismatchThe page is served over https but the canonical points to http.
• Infocanonical.other-pageThe canonical points to a different URL, so search engines will treat this page as a duplicate of that URL.
• Warningcanonical.paginated-to-firstPage 2 or later of a paginated series (?page=2, /page/2/) names the first page as its canonical, so search engines may drop it and miss the items only it links to.