Planet13 - 5:48 pm on Mar 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

However, errors in the canonical tag can also create a disaster so again, technical precision.

To wit, my the canoncial tags on my ecommerce site use the format:

mydomain.com/product_code_token.html

You just plug in the token that calls the product_code and it automatically populates the canonical tag. No brainer, right?

Unless of course you use the product_NAME token instead of the product_code token, since the product NAME has all sorts of spaces in it and will give you a 404 error.

So in webmaster tools, I saw about two hundred crawl errors that said something like this:

mydomain.com/Really Nice Widget.html

And I had no idea where google bot was coming up with these URLs. "Googlebot must be crazy," I thought to myself. I even looked at the on page links on the pages that webmastertools said were pointing to these bad URLs.

It wasn't until I looked at the source code and then realized that the canonical link tags were all messed up that I realized I had blown it again...