Canonicals: Contains Fragment URL

Pages with a rel=”canonical” that includes a fragment URL in the href attribute.

Google generally doesn’t support fragment URLs. These annotations are ignored and not used for canonicalisation by Google.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Canonicals’ tab and ‘Contains Fragment URL’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Canonicals‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs include rel=”canonical” annotations with an href that contains a URL with a fragment in it.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Has the canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/#example">

The fragment ‘#example’ should not be present in the canonical href.

How To Fix

Remove fragment URLs from canonical annotations and ensure they are to accurate indexable pages to avoid them being ignored by search engines, and any potential indexing or ranking unpredictability.