Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Canonical issues using Screaming Frog and other tools?
-
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?
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
URL has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Screaming Frog Content Showing charset=UTF-8
I am running a site through Screaming Frog and many of the pages under "Content" are reading text/html; charset=UTF-8. Does this harm ones SEO and what does this really mean? I'm running his site along with this competitors and the competitors seems very clean with content pages reading text/html. What does one do to change this if it is a negative thing? Thank you
Technical SEO | | seoessentials0 -
Exclude status codes in Screaming Frog
I have a very large ecommerce site I'm trying to spider using screaming frog. Problem is I keep hanging even though I have turned off the high memory safeguard under configuration. The site has approximately 190,000 pages according to the results of a Google site: command. The site architecture is almost completely flat. Limiting the search by depth is a possiblity, but it will take quite a bit of manual labor as there are literally hundreds of directories one level below the root. There are many, many duplicate pages. I've been able to exclude some of them from being crawled using the exclude configuration parameters. There are thousands of redirects. I haven't been able to exclude those from the spider b/c they don't have a distinguishing character string in their URLs. Does anyone know how to exclude files using status codes? I know that would help. If it helps, the site is kodylighting.com. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide.
Technical SEO | | DonnaDuncan0 -
Image Indexing Issue by Google
Hello All,My URL is: www.thesalebox.comI have Submitted my image Sitemap in google webmaster tool on 10th Oct 2013,Still google could not indexing any of my web images,Please refer my sitemap - www.thesalebox.com/AppliancesHomeEntertainment.xml and www.thesalebox.com/Hardware.xmland my webmaster status and image indexing status are below,
Technical SEO | | CommercePunditCan you please help me, why my images are not indexing in google yet? is there any issue? please give me suggestions?Thanks!
0 -
Diagnosing Canonical Errors Is Screaming frog reliable?
Morning from suny & warm wetherby UK 🙂 On this page http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/how-we-care-for-you/right-to-manage/ screaming frog is citing a canonical error but I'm confused as this piece of code is in place: http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/About/right-to-manage" /> So my question is please - "Does this page http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/how-we-care-for-you/right-to-manage/ have a caninical error or is screaming frog useless? Other examples where screaming frog is picking up canonical errors include:
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/what-our-customers-say/right-to-manage/
http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/buying-a-home/right-to-manage/ Oh forgot to say the preffered version is http://www.goldsboroughestates.co.uk/About/right-to-manage/ Any insights welcvome 🙂0 -
Does using parentheses affect the crawlers?
Quick question: if you using a parantheses around a keyword, do search bots still recognize the keyword? Fox ex: Welcome to a website about the National Basketball Association (NBA). Will the bots recognize that I'm trying to optimize to NBA and not (NBA)? Is this different for tags vs. actual body copy?
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics2