Why does Rel Canonical show up as a notice?

[rrolfe]

In the crawl diagnostics screen "Rel Canonical" shows up as a notice for every page that has a rel="canonical" meta tag in it.  Why is this the case?

Shouldn't every page have a canonical tag on it to show the absolute URL to the content?  Wouldn't a better notice be to display pages that do not have a canonical tag instead?

I could be wrong but that would make more sense to me. (In fact.. let's be honest here.. I probably am wrong.. but I'd like someone to explain it if they could.)

Thanks

[irvingw]

I have seen so many people use the canonical tag incorrectly, that it can certainly help troubleshoot site issues by being able to download a list of canonical tags. I do agree on your premise though and untagged pages can be equally problematic and the crawler should allow us to see which pages are not tagged.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Irving is correct - we add it as a notice because it's a good thing to keep track of, and because some people do incorrectly implement this tag, which causes problems.  I'll pass your suggestion for also tracking non-canonical pages on to our Product team.  Thanks!

[rrolfe]

It would also be nice to have an optIon to turn off the notices for pages that are using the canonical tag. This is helpful for those of us that try to use the crawl diagnostics page as another tool to find potential on page problems. I would rather hide the fact that a page has a canonical tag and show me the ones that don't. That allows me to have a fairly clear picture of things that need to be fixed on the site.

[RuthBurrReedy]

The ability to hide various notices and warnings is something a lot of our users have requested - we're working on it!