Canonicals in crawling reports
-
The crawling reports gives info about several meta data missing, what about the lack of a canonical tag? This would be nice too... and images without alt tag (or empty).
-
Thanks!
-
excellent points there CleaverPHD just to point our screaming frog is free up to a 500 URLs -great if you want to give it a go before a purchase
-
As Chris points out, if you do not have a canonical link, the crawl points that out. You may need to download the CSV file and open in excel to see what you want to see. There is a column titled "Rel Canonical" and if you have a FALSE response, there was no canonical found and TRUE for versa vice. I find the CSV much more more helpful than what is shown on the web page and PDF report. The new interface has the CSV link at the bottom left of the page and the PDF at the top right. It used to be both were top right (which makes more sense to me) and so it may be a little confusing if you were used to where things you to be.
Just for reference, the canonical tag is not required on a page, and in fact if you DO have one on a page you have to be careful with it. Google considers a canonical link as the same as a 301 redirect (without moving the user). So, if you had a canonical in place and it is pointed to the wrong page, this could have major negative consequences to your site. This is why there is a alert in your Moz crawl if you have a canonical link on a page due to the potential of it causing issues.
You may have the canonicals properly implemented for given pages, but Moz cannot detect if your canonical is achieving the end that you are setting out to accomplish.
Case in point for me. I use the canonical to self technique on a lot of pages to correct for some indexing issues on a site I manage. I get thousands of the "you have a canonical link on this page" alerts from Moz. I ignore them as I know that they are supposed to be there. What I have to do is to import the crawl into excel and then add a column with an EXACT function to make sure that the page url is matching the canonical url (i.e. the canonical link points to the page it sits on). (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/exact-function-HP010062564.aspx) If the EXACT function returns true, I know that my canonical to self links are implemented properly. This is a simple way that I use the CSV file from Moz as a canonical verification tool. If there are pages with canonicals that do not point to self, the EXACT function then shows false for those pages and gives me a short list to manually check from there.
Now that I think about it, I will put this suggestion into Moz as a way to make the canonical information in the crawl more useful. They could show FALSE if canonical is missing, TRUE if it is present and SELF if the canonical points to itself. Would at least be a bit more actionable.
As an aside, if you really want a better crawl report, I would use the Screaming Frog Spider tool
http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
It can also help you find all the other things you mention, it is not as user friendly as the Moz spider, but it has more options. You have to pay for it, but I would bet 99% of people would say the cost is worth it.
Cheers!
-
Hiya,
If a page doesn't have a canonical tag and it need's one it would be a duplicate page, Moz currently does point that out for you. The on page grader can help you with many of the alt tag problems too.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Crawl Issue Question
Hey guys, I have run the crawl on my WordPress site and Moz finds a "Critical crawl issue" for my site on a broken link (404 error): mydomain.com/**%25s **, I can't seem to be able to find such a link anyway and I have run the website through several other tools that scan for broken links and such and there is no such result.
Moz Bar | | K.Net
This link doesn't exist on my site at all and I don't know where Moz got it from, I have made changes to my site and recrawled several times and the specific error persists. Does anyone have any ideas?0 -
Duplicate Content & Title Tag Group Fields on MoZ Report
Hello, On my SEO MOZ exported Site Crawl CSV report, I have columns for Duplicate Content Group & for Duplicate Title Tag Group. The values in the columns are numerical - 20, 5 , 15, etc. Can anyone explain to me what these values represent and how I can fix the issues I presume they represent? Thank you,
Moz Bar | | AED-1
Scott0 -
Error in Duplicate Content Being Reported - Pages Aren't Actually Duplicates
The recent crawl of one of our sites revealed a high number of duplicate content issues. However, when I viewed the report for pages with duplicate content I noticed almost all of them are not duplicates. For example, these two pages are marked as dupes:
Moz Bar | | M_D_Golden_Peak
https://www.writersstore.com/publishers/hollywood-creative-directory
https://www.writersstore.com/authors/g-miki-hayden These are thin as far as content goes but definitely not duplicates. Any recommendations or ways to adjust the settings so that these false positives aren't clogging up our site crawl report?0 -
I'm getting, "you're not using the rel="canonical" META attribute" in my crawl diagnotic
I'm running a campaign crawler through Moz on this particular page: http://www.henley.ac.uk/executive-education/leadership-and-management-programmes/ but I'm getting a notifcaiton from Moz saying, "you're not using the rel="canonical" META attribute" I don't understand what this means!! Has anyone else had this problem, or can they help me understand what this means and how to fix it? Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving from the UK! Virginia
Moz Bar | | blackboxideas0 -
Moz Report: Number of Domains linking to Domain
In the Moz report, what does the "number of domains linking to domain" indicate? I'm analyzing our competitors link profile and noticed some numbers as high as 2369232? Is there a form that explains the reports a little more in detail? Thanks,
Moz Bar | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Is there a problem with New Campaign crawls being slow?
Hi I've created 3 new campaigns but results not showing as usual. I know the full results take up to 7 days but I usually see some basic info in a few minutes of creating the campaign. This problem happened a while ago and the campaign was never quite right in SEOMoz. Thanks for your help Steve
Moz Bar | | stevecounsell0 -
Moz Dupe content crawl anomaly
Hi Moz has completed a crawl for a site i'm working on which also has a development area (hence with lots of dupe content) on a sub domain (and this dev area hasn't been hidden from crawlers via password, robots, gwt etc etc). Moz dupe content report is not showing any of these urls though even though my campaign setting is on 'root' domain so i would have thought report should be listing the subdomain urls as dupe content (because they are dupe content). Any ideas ? Cheers Dan
Moz Bar | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Moz just did my weekly "crawl" and claims my meta titles and descriptions are "missing," but they aren't. What's up with this?
I can check for my titles and descriptions in the source. They are there, always have been. what in the hell?
Moz Bar | | LifeisRosie0