Scanning For Duplicate Canonical Tags

[edmundsseo]

I'm looking for a solution for identifying pages on a site that have either empty/undefined canonical tags, or duplicate canonical tags (meaning the tag occurs twice within the same page).

I've used Screaming Frog to view sitewide canonical values, but the tool cannot identify when pages use the tag twice, nor can it differentiate between pages that have an empty canonical tag and pages that have no canonical tag at all.

Any help finding a tool of some sort that can assist me in doing this would be much appreciated, as I'm working with tens of thousands of pages and can't do this manually.

[ThompsonPaul]

I think Screaming Frog is still the solution you want, John, but it's not configured to do what you need "out of the box". You're going to need to write a custom query for Screaming Frog to run while it's indexing your site.

This capability is only available in the paid version of the tool, but you'll need the paid version anyway to be able to crawl 10,000 page sites as the free tool cuts out at 500 pages.

You'll find the Custom settings link under the Configuration tab in the top navigation bar of the tool. Essentially what you're doing is writing custom filters.

You'll need to write a regex (regular expression) that is capable of finding pages with no canonical tag at all, and another which is capable of finding empty canonical tags. If your regex-fu is really strong, you may be able to write a single expression to capture both these states.

Had you already tried the custom queries with Screaming Frog?

Paul

[edmundsseo]

Paul,

Thanks for your reply! I have used the paid version of Screaming Frog with regex to exclude pages with certain parameters, but I have not tried the custom queries.

Could you give me an example of a custom query that would find empty canonical tags? That would be extremely helpful.