Canonicals in crawling reports

[KBC]

The crawling reports gives info about several meta data missing, what about the lack of a canonical tag?  This would be nice too... and images without alt tag (or empty).

[GPainter]

Hiya,

If a page doesn't have a canonical tag and it need's one it would be a duplicate page, Moz currently does point that out for you. The on page grader can help you with many of the alt tag problems too.

[CleverPhD]

As Chris points out, if you do not have a canonical link, the crawl points that out.  You may need to download the CSV file and open in excel to see what you want to see.  There is a column titled "Rel Canonical" and if you have a FALSE response, there was no canonical found and TRUE for versa vice.  I find the CSV much more more helpful than what is shown on the web page and PDF report.  The new interface has the CSV link at the bottom left of the page and the PDF at the top right.  It used to be both were top right (which makes more sense to me) and so it may be a little confusing if you were used to where things you to be.

Just for reference, the canonical tag is not required on a page, and in fact if you DO have one on a page you have to be careful with it.  Google considers a canonical link as the same as a 301 redirect (without moving the user).  So, if you had a canonical in place and it is pointed to the wrong page, this could have major negative consequences to your site. This is why there is a alert in your Moz crawl if you have a canonical link on a page due to the potential of it causing issues.

You may have the canonicals properly implemented for given pages, but Moz cannot detect if your canonical is achieving the end that you are setting out to accomplish.

Case in point for me.   I use the canonical to self technique on a lot of pages to correct for some indexing issues on a site I manage.  I get thousands of the "you have a canonical link on this page" alerts from Moz.  I ignore them as I know that they are supposed to be there.   What I have to do is to import the crawl into excel and then add a column with an EXACT function to make sure that the page url is matching the canonical url (i.e. the canonical link points to the page it sits on).   (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/exact-function-HP010062564.aspx)  If the EXACT function returns true, I know that my canonical to self links are implemented properly.  This is a simple way that I use the CSV file from Moz as a canonical verification tool.  If there are pages with canonicals that do not point to self, the EXACT function then shows false for those pages and gives me a short list to manually check from there.

Now that I think about it, I will put this suggestion into Moz as a way to make the canonical information in the crawl more useful.  They could show FALSE if canonical is missing, TRUE if it is present and SELF if the canonical points to itself.  Would at least be a bit more actionable.

As an aside, if you really want a better crawl report, I would use the Screaming Frog Spider tool

http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

It can also help you find all the other things you mention, it is not as user friendly as the Moz spider, but it has more options.  You have to pay for it, but I would bet 99% of people would say the cost is worth it.

Cheers!

[GPainter]

excellent points there CleaverPHD just to point our screaming frog is free up to a 500 URLs -great if you want to give it a go before a purchase

[KBC]

Thanks!