Canonical tags and SEOmoz crawls

[neooptic]

Hi there. Recently, we've made some changes to http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/ to implement canonical tags to some dynamically generated pages to stop duplicate content issues. Previously, these were blocked with robots.txt. In Webmaster Tools, everything looks great - pages crawled has shot up, and overall traffic and sales has seen a positive increase. However the SEOmoz crawl report is now showing a huge increase in duplicate content issues. What I'd like to know is whether SEOmoz registers a canonical tag as preventing a piece of duplicate content, or just adds to it the notices report. That is, if I have 10 pages of duplicate content all with correct canonical tags, will I still see 10 errors in the crawl, but also 10 notices showing a canonical has been found? Or, should it be 0 duplicate content errors, but 10 notices of canonicals? I know it's a small point, but it could potentially have a big difference. Thanks!

[neooptic]

Thanks guys. That's what I suspected, but obviously I wanted to be sure before I went to the client.

[TellThemEverything]

I have raised this to the seomoz team a few times - it's a work in progress still. they are getting better, but my site still shows the same issues - duplicate content errors that even the semoz support team agree aren't really an issue because of canonical tags.

I suggest just ignoring that for now and waiting for an update.

[Bevelwise]

I am actually unsure if SEOMoz's crawl report does not necessarily take into account all the ways duplicate content can be fixed.  Another thing that will create a similar affect is when you use Google webmaster tools to handle parameter handling.  I don't think it's as big of an issue to just have these popup in your crawl report.  We use these crawl reports as indicators to help us identify these issues.  If you've fixed the issues with best practice and seen positive results in the search engines that's really what matters.