site.canonical-chain

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 a crawl or a build directory. 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 crawl https://example.com --rule site.canonical-chain

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "site.canonical-chain"
  ]
}

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

• Infosite.unlinked-pagesHTML files in the build output that no other page links to.
• Errorsite.canonical-target-brokenPages name a canonical URL that answers 4xx/5xx or does not load, so search engines cannot use it.
• Warningsite.canonical-target-redirectsPages name a canonical URL that redirects; the canonical should be the final URL.
• Warningsite.canonical-target-noindexPages name as canonical a page that is set to noindex, so the page meant to be indexed is kept out of the index.
• Infosite.links-to-noindexPages set to noindex are linked from other pages of the site. A noindex page that much of the site links to is often noindex by mistake. Cart, search, login and account pages are left out.
• Warningsite.hreflang-target-invalidhreflang alternates point to URLs that are broken, redirect, are noindex or name another URL as canonical, so the annotation is ignored.
• Warningsite.url-variant-duplicateA page also answers 200 at its URL with the trailing slash added or removed, or with the path in another case, without redirecting or naming the page as canonical. Google treats each spelling as a separate URL.
• Warningsite.parameter-duplicatesCrawled URLs that differ only in their query string show the same text, and none names one of them as canonical.