Is The Number of Duplicate Pages reduced after adding canonical ref to the dupe versions ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Is the number of duplicate pages reported in a dupe page content error report reduced on subsequent crawls, if you have resolved the dupe content problem via adding the canonical tag to duplicate versions (referring the original page).

Like it would if you were solving the problem via a 301 redirect (i think/presume) ?

Cheers

Dan

[Travis-W]

Yep, just now you will see a Canonical "Notice" in SEOmoz instead of a Duplicate Content Error.

It works the same way as  301 except the user can still visit the page.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Travis

Although bit confused since surely if a user can still visit the page so can a crawler, i take it though from what your saying that the canonical tag tells moz (& google) crawler to not count it as a page at all ?

Cheers

Dan

[Travis-W]

Yessir, Google will not index the page and moz will not report any errors on the page.

The pages become kind of like air.  Users and crawlers can still navigate through it but it is "invisible".

[Dan-Lawrence]

But will moz count it as a page ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

as in numbers of pages in the crawl will be reduced after dupe fixed with canonical, or numbers in the crawl will stay the same but just not reported as errors.  The site i'm examining is over crawl limit (10000+ pages) with loads of dupe content errors so if fix via canonical will that reduce number of pages in the moz crawl (not errors) like a 301 would ?