Tool for scanning the content of the canonical tag
-
Hey All,
question for you. What is your favorite tool/method for scanning a website for specific tags? Specifically (as my situation dictates now) for canonical tags?
I am looking for a tool that is flexible, hopefully free, and highly customizable (for instance, you can specify the tag to look for). I like the concept of using google docs with the import xml feature but as you can only use 50 of those commands at a time it is very limiting (http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/).
I do have a campaign set up using the tools which is great! but I need something that returns a response faster and can get data from more than 10,000 links. Our cms unfortunately puts out some odd canonical tags depending on how a page is rendered and I am trying to catch them quickly before it gets indexed and causes problems. Eventually I would also like to be able to scan for other specific tags, hence the customizable concern. If we have to write a vb script to get it into excel I suppose we can do that.
Cheers,
Josh
-
No idea on that one - it's still pretty new. The developers actually chimed in on the post, so you could ask them in the comments.
-
Thanks Dr. Pete and Marcus.
I just finished reading the post. I have looked at Screaming Frog before but was hoping to be able to find a way to do it myself. Just didn't want to plop money down on something that seemed like it should be able to be done using tools I already had. But the software does look good. Any thought on if they will come out with a one time purchase instead of a yearly subscription?
Cheers!
Josh
-
Hey Dr. Pete, Joshua
I was just coming here to say that I had read the Dr. Pete post and this may do the job. It's a paid bit of a software but I will be picking it up later. I have my guys knocking up a canonical checker that will be free for all but that may take a day or so to get perfect.
Let me know if you have a play with Screaming Frog!
Marcus
-
I'm pretty sure that Screaming Frog SEO Spider will do it, but you need the paid version to custom-filter on the canonical tag. I've got a post going up about it tomorrow.
-
Great, really appreciate it! Many thumbs up
-
Hey Josh,
Right, cool. I have got a few jobs to sort out but I am going to have a bash at knocking this up this afternoon. Should be easy enough (he said, damning himself to hours of problems).
Leave it with me for 24 hours.
Marcus
-
Hey Marcus,
thanks for the quick response. That is exactly what I would be looking for. I do have a list of url's and that is also simple enough to get from something like xenu. Would love to work with you on this.
Thanks.
Josh
-
Hey, I am not aware of any such tool, but it should not be too hard to put one together, maybe a useful little tool as well.
If you have all of your pages in spreadsheet or database, it should be easy enough to write a little script that cycles through them.
Start Loop
-
request page
-
parse code to get canonical URL
-
compare page to canonical
-
output problem URLs
End Loop
Slightly over simplified and requires a list of all your URLs but would be willing to help put something like this together, could be useful for all of us, especially for those (like me) that work with a lot of CMS sites.
Cheers
Marcus
-
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
-
Difference keyword tool and related topics
Hello, Can someone explain me the difference between those 2 ? Because to me they are very similar. Thank you,
Moz Pro | | seoanalytics0 -
Canonical tag on webstore products to avoid Duplicate Page Content ?
Hi, I would like to have an opinion on what how we are planning to solve the issue with Duplicate Page Contents that MOZ PRO is showing us. MOZ Pro is showing us a lot of pages with duplicate content as High Priority Issue. Mainly the problem is with products which have very few differences between them, e.g. pink bike model X and red bike model X. So we decided to implement a canonical tag on these products, and the pink bike model X will now have a canonical pointing to the red bike model X. So hopefully we will be ranking higher with our red bike model X and our pink bike model X will disapear from the index. Am I right ? Is it a good practice, since we will loose long tails indexes? I check each canonical in the Search Console, and we have extremely few searched for "pink bike model X" most of searches are "bike model X". Thank you in advance for your opinion. Isabelle
Moz Pro | | isabelledylag0 -
Duplicate Content
Hello, I'm managing a site which shows as having duplicate page issues (in the crawl analyser) for 3 pages. Basically the site is offering 3 different options of the same product so depending on which size you select, you are directed to the relevant page. These 3 pages are basically identical apart from a slight difference in copy regarding the size (small, medium, large) Is this likely to be a big issue regarding SEO, and what would the moz community suggest re this? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | wearehappymedia0 -
Importing Keywords... WITH tags?
Is this possible? I've found how to export to a CSV and copy/paste these into the usual keyword management page. Ideally, I would like to export/import the full information, along with the tags...... I have several brands that have a brand.com and a brandstore.com Any other cross-domain features I should be aware of? Thanks in advance......
Moz Pro | | EliteErikSEO0 -
Why does Crawl Diagnostics report this as duplicate content?
Hi guys, we've been addressing a duplicate content problem on our site over the past few weeks. Lately, we've implemented rel canonical tags in various parts of our ecommerce store, over time, and observing the effects by both tracking changes in SEOMoz and Websmater tools. Although our duplicate content errors are definitely decreasing, I can't help but wonder why some URLs are still being flagged with duplicate content by our SEOmoz crawler. Here's an example, taken directly from our Crawl Diagnostics Report: URL with 4 Duplicate Content errors:
Moz Pro | | yacpro13
/safety-lights.html Duplicate content URLs:
/safety-lights.html ?cat=78&price=-100
/safety-lights.html?cat=78&dir=desc&order=position /safety-lights.html?cat=78 /safety-lights.html?manufacturer=514 What I don't understand, is all of the URLS with URL parameters have a rel canonical tag pointing to the 'real' URL
/safety-lights.html So why is SEOMoz crawler still flagging this as duplicate content?0 -
Where can I find the page strength tool?
I have an SEOmoz account and can't seem to find the page strength tool. Is it somewhere in research tools?
Moz Pro | | elenaroi0 -
Canonical for Mobile
Hi Guys, I am curious why in SEOMoz, our mobile site is showing to have the canonical tags used on the desktop site but when you double check the code of the mobile website it is showing m.domain.com Any thoughts on why we are seeing this? Also is there any lag in the code updates being reported through the SEOmoz toolset? Thanks for all your help! Cheers,
Moz Pro | | lwalker0 -
Canonical Confusion
Hey guys, I'm having a hard time grasping canonical links and the warnings I'm getting on my report card. I'm using Yoast SEO Plug-In and can see that every page on my site has a canonical reference to the URL of the page I'm at. Can someone please enlighten me on this subject. I'm reading everything I can about Canonicalization (honestly...an easier word please) but I does not make sense yet. Thanks! I added the notice I'm getting on my report card. This is my domain http://bbguard.com.ve swG7x.png
Moz Pro | | FDSConsulting0