Issues

Canonicals: Outside <head>

Pages with a canonical link element that is outside of the <head> element in the HTML.

The canonical link element should be within the <head> element, or search engines will ignore it.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Canonicals’ tab and ‘Outside <head>’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Check to see if there are any ‘Invalid HTML Elements in Head’ under the ‘Validation’ tab, that could be the cause.

If this issue has also been triggered, use our ‘How To Debug Invalid HTML Elements In The Head‘ tutorial to debug.

This issue is triggered when a page has a canonical link element placed outside of the <head> element in the HTML.

Example:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> ... </head> <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/"> <body> ... </body> </html>

Ensure canonical link elements are in the <head> element of a page’s HTML to be considered by search engines.