R006: Canonical URL points at a different-locale variant
A canonical that points at the English or French version tells search engines the Arabic page is a copy, so they may index the other locale in its place.
The check
- Id
- R006
- Category
- Document and metadata
- Default severity
When it fires
low confidence
On an Arabic page,
rel=canonicalpoints at a URL with a foreign locale in its path, such as/en/or/fr/, or in its query, such as?lang=en, while the page's own path carries no such segment. It matches URL patterns, so it reports at low confidence.Fix: Set the canonical to the Arabic URL of this page.
What it leaves alone
A page with no canonical, a canonical that is not a valid URL, and a page whose own path carries a foreign locale, like /en/pricing, since that page is not the Arabic one.
Broken, then fixed
<!-- on https://example.com/ar/pricing -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/en/pricing"><!-- on https://example.com/ar/pricing -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/ar/pricing">Check it by hand
Run document.querySelector('link[rel=canonical]')?.href in the DevTools console on the Arabic page. It should be that page's own Arabic URL.
What the report shows you
Each R006 finding carries the fields below that apply to it, so you can see why it fired without rerunning the scan.
- canonical
- The canonical URL as the page declares it.
- pagePath
- The path of the scanned page, to compare against.
More document and metadata checks
- document direction missing, contradicted, or declared only in CSS
- html[lang] missing, non-Arabic, or contradicting detected content
- hreflang alternate set lacks any Arabic entry on an Arabic page
- <title> or meta description majority-Latin on an Arabic page
- OpenGraph/Twitter metadata untranslated or og:locale missing/invalid
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