Canonical tag points to a different website

A canonical tag is a line of code that tells search engines which web address is the "master" version of a page, used when the same content might appear at more than one address. This check looks for canonical tags that point to a completely different domain. On this site, at least one page's canonical tag points to a different website rather than to itself or another page on your own domain. A canonical tag pointing at another site tells Google to give that page's ranking credit to the other website, not yours. This is usually left behind by a scraper copying your content or a staging/test version of the site, and it can erase the page's rankings from Google entirely. Your developer should check the canonical tag on the affected page and correct it to point at the page's own address on your domain, or remove it if there is no other version of the content. This is a small code change, typically finished within an hour once the affected pages are identified.