Can Moz use canconical links to prevent notices about duplicate content issues?

[SEOAndy]

if so how do we enable this - we've an average size site with a few hundred products but they appear in multiple categories, canonical url points to it's primary category (but a new page exists for each section... so for /cat-a/abc there will be another page cat-b/abc and again but the canonical points to cat-a always for that product) basically I see this kind of duplication error / notice as a false positive... help me

[FedeEinhorn]

Moz can't actually read the canonicals and be sure they are set right as they depend on what do you want to be indexed.

I can recall this question asked several times before, Moz support responded:

"We prefer to provide data that takes the tack of "rather be safe then sorry" and report on the issues to the highest degree of error that we have seen Google penalize a site for so it is sometimes true that they are not as strict as our tools. It isn't a bug in our system that shows these errors; it is just that we have decided to show errors that Google may consider at their strictest level of penalization."

EDIT: I am sure Magento has some extension to manage those urls and allow you to set the products url right so they don't include any of cat-a, featured, detail, etc. Like Wordpress has SEO by Yoast, there's "ultimate SEO suite" for magento.

[SEOAndy]

the reality is slightly different to what i've said, basically the system causes the creation of cat-a/abc not being in cat-b in most cases but rather /featured/abc and /detail/abc or something like that ... we cant restructure the system as it runs on magento and basically that is how it does it. I have deindexed a few bits but i dont think the way it is set up is of great concern to be honest. the concerning bit is more that if moz cant detect that this isnt technically a dupe is it the same for other systems and therefore are others and myself hitting false negative responses for some reason?

[FedeEinhorn]

Unfortunately I think that isn't an option.

You will probably be better with "noindexing" all those duplicated pages or even have the site restructured to avoid the category name in the product url.

Having a canonical basically tells the engine to index only that one, so if you did the /cat-a/abc for the SEO perspective, you are actually not getting that much of a benefit, as /cat-b/abc won't be indexed.