Canonical issues using Screaming Frog and other tools?

[Flock.Media]

In the Directives tab within Screaming Frog, can anyone tell me what the difference between "canonicalised", "canonical", and "no canonical" means? They're found in the filter box. I see the data but am not sure how to interpret them. Which one of these would I check to find canonical issues within a website? Are there any other easy ways to identify canonical issues?

[screamingfrog]

Hello

I spotted this thread and was just about to reply, but Dirk has answered it all perfectly. Thanks Dirk!

Under 'reports' there's also a 'canonical errors' report which will show canonicals with various technical issues - Those that are blocked by robots.txt, have no response, 3XX redirect, 4XX or 5XX error (essentially anything other than a 200 ‘OK’ response). It will also show any URLs discovered only via a canonical, that are not linked to internally from the sites own link structure (in the ‘unlinked’ column when ‘true’).

Hope that helps anyway.

Cheers!

Dan

[DirkC]

Hi,

The difference between them

• canonical : url has a canonical url - which can be self-referencing (canonical url = url) or not

• canonicalised: url has a canonical url which is not self-referencing (canonical url <> url)

• no canonical : quite obvious - the url has no canonical.

Potential issues could be - url's that you would like to have a canonical don't have a canonical or url's that are canonicalised don't have the right canonical url. You can use the lists (both canonicalised & no canonical) from Screaming Frog to check them - but it's up to you to judge whether the canonical is ok or not (no automated tool can guess what your intentions are).
Typical mistakes with canonicals: all url's have the same canonical url (like the homepage), or have canonical url's that do not exist. You could also check this with Screaming Frog using the setting "respect canonicals" - this way only the canonical url's will be shown in the listing.

Also keep in mind that canonical url's are merely a friendly request to Google to index the canonical rather than the normal url - but it's not an obligation for Google to do this (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en quote: "the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure. (Note: We attempt to respect this, but cannot guarantee this in all cases.)"

Dirk