My number of duplicate page title and temporary redirect warnings increased after I enabled Canonical urls. Why? Is this normal?

[btsseo78]

After receiving my first SEO moz report, I had some duplicate page titles and temporary redirects. I was told enabling Canonical urls would take of this. I enabled the Canonical URLs, but the next report showed that both of those problems had increased three fold after enabled the canonical urls! What happened?

[MikeRoberts]

This exact thing happened to me after SEOMoz switched to a new method for determining duplication issues a few weeks ago. After the following crawl my numbers went back to normal though. Double-check the pages against Webmaster tools to make sure they aren't actually showing as duplicates and if WMT doesn't show anything wrong then give it a week and you should see your numbers returning to normal in the next crawl report.

[btsseo78]

MIke. Thanks for the reply. I actually panicked and disabled the Canonical URLs as I was afraid to damage my seo ranking. But maybe I should enable them again and wait for the next crawl. We are on the volusion platform and I also asked them to look into it as well.

[MikeRoberts]

I'd keep the canonicals in place. Always double-check using multiple sources when you have the ability to do so. SEOMoz crawls and error reporting are great but there are the occasional hiccups. When I logged in and saw that I had something to the effect of 1900 new duplicate content errors showing up, I freaked out too and got worried something went horribly wrong. I looked over a random sampling of canonicals, checked that they were implemented correctly, checked with my web team to see if they made any big changes without letting me know, looked at Webmaster Tools to see what it said, and tried to find answers here in the Q&A as well.. Then I was pointed to this post on the blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/visualizing-duplicate-web-pages.