Canonicals & duplicates

rel=canonical contains a URL fragment

One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.

How serious: Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
Based on: Google's own documentation

What is wrong

Your pages use a canonical tag—a line of code that tells search engines which version of a page is the "official" one. However, some of these canonical tags include a fragment, which is the part of a URL after the hash symbol (#). Search engines ignore fragments when deciding which pages are duplicates, so including one in your canonical tag is pointless and confuses your intent.

Why it costs you

The practical effect is that your canonical tag does not work as you intended. Search engines may not treat the pages the way you wanted them to, or they may spend crawl time on pages you meant to consolidate. You lose control over which version appears in search results.

How to fix it

Find each canonical tag that contains a # symbol and remove everything from the # onwards. For example, change `<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page#section">` to `<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page">`. If you use a template to generate canonical tags across many pages, fix the template itself rather than editing pages one by one.

What the audit tests

The canonical address contains no # fragment

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Other canonicals & duplicates checks

All 136 checks