Do crawl reports see canonical tags?

[Ericc22]

Greetings,

I just redesigned my site, www.funderstanding.com, and have the old site pointing to the new site via canonical URLs.

I had a new crawl test run and it showed a large amount of duplicate content. Does the SEO Moz crawl tool validate canonical urls and adjusts the duplicate content count or is this note considered?

FYI, I sent from no duplicate content to having 865 errors since the redesign went up so that seems suspicious. I would think though that assuming the canonical tag were used properly, and I hope it is?, that this would not be a problem??

All help with this is most appreciated.

Eric

[oznappies]

Are the canonicals in the old site pointing to the new site? The new site one looks fine, I cannot see any links to the olds site to check.

standarised endings \ - Ok

https: rejected - OK

url match canonical and sitemap - Ok

It seems very odd.

[Ericc22]

Thank you for the quick reply!

Assuming this is what you are looking for here are a few of the URLs on the old site:

http://www.funderstanding.com/coaster

http://www.funderstanding.com/content

http://www.funderstanding.com/category/content/theories

http://www.funderstanding.com/content/right-brain-vs-left-brain

http://www.funderstanding.com/content/behaviorism

Does that help?

Eric

[USHoleInOne]

A 301 Redirect removed any duplicate content errors that were showing in the crawl report, maybe redirecting the old site to the new site this way would help.

[Ericc22]

Not sure what you mean? I thought 301s were to be avoided for SEO reasons when using canonicals?

[oznappies]

<link href="http://www.funderstanding.com/content" rel="canonical"> is the only one that does not pint to the old site from those you mentioned. With links from that page it may find enough of the old site to produce the dupes.

You can fix it and then request a crawl

[oznappies]

Googles view is:

301 when you can and canonical when you do not have direct server access to do a 301. But, I would and do, have both to ensure both case and endings are correct for the landing page. i.e. someone might tweet http://www.funderstanding.com/V2/Coaster instead of the lowercase version and google will report dupe content if it is not dealt with.

[Ericc22]

Thanks! Is there a good way for me to check the whole site to identify a problem? In other words, if one is a problem, I should assume that others could be a problem. What is the best way to check? Thank you so much! I am not quite sure what to do and help is most appreciated. Eric