Canonical URL Contains Fragment

What This Means

The href attribute of the canonical link contains a fragment identifier (e.g., https://yourdomain.com/page/#section). Fragments identify an in-page location and are processed client-side — they are not sent to the server in HTTP requests.

Why It Matters for SEO

Because fragments are stripped before the HTTP request is made, a canonical URL containing a fragment cannot be fetched and verified by search engines. The fragment portion is ignored, effectively making the canonical point to the base URL without the fragment. This can create unintended canonical relationships where https://page/#section and https://page/ are treated as the same canonical — which may or may not be the intended behavior.

What the Platform Checks

The platform parses each canonical href and checks for the presence of a # character followed by a fragment identifier. Fires when a fragment is found in the canonical href.

How to Fix It

• Remove the fragment from the canonical href: change href="https://yourdomain.com/page/#section" to href="https://yourdomain.com/page/".
• Canonical URLs should always be the full page URL without any fragment identifier.
• If the page is meant to be reached at a specific anchor: use the base URL as the canonical, and rely on the page's heading structure to deliver users to the right section after loading.