Canonicals & duplicates

Relative rel=canonical

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 site uses relative canonical tags instead of absolute ones. A canonical tag tells search engines which version of a page is the official one when duplicates exist. A relative canonical points to another page without the full web address—for example, `/about` instead of `https://www.yoursite.com/about`. Search engines may struggle to follow these correctly, especially on complex sites or when pages are accessed through different domains or protocols.

Why it costs you

When search engines cannot reliably interpret your canonical tags, they may index the wrong versions of your pages, show duplicates in search results, or split your ranking authority between similar pages. This reduces the visibility of your actual content and wastes your crawl budget—the time search engines spend scanning your site.

How to fix it

Change all relative canonicals to absolute ones in your page templates. If you use a template system, edit it once rather than each page individually. The canonical tag should always include the full address with the protocol: `<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.yoursite.com/page-name" />` rather than `<link rel="canonical" href="/page-name" />`. Check your content management system settings or template files for where these tags are generated.

What the audit tests

The canonical tag uses a full address, not a relative path

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Other canonicals & duplicates checks

All 136 checks