Tool for scanning the content of the canonical tag

[prima-253509]

Hey All,

question for you. What is your favorite tool/method for scanning a website for specific tags? Specifically (as my situation dictates now) for canonical tags?

I am looking for a tool that is flexible, hopefully free, and highly customizable (for instance, you can specify the tag to look for). I like the concept of using google docs with the import xml feature but as you can only use 50 of those commands at a time it is very limiting (http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/seo/how-to-build-agile-seo-tools-using-google-docs/).

I do have a campaign set up using the tools which is great! but I need something that returns a response faster and can get data from more than 10,000 links. Our cms unfortunately puts out some odd canonical tags depending on how a page is rendered and I am trying to catch them quickly before it gets indexed and causes problems. Eventually I would also like to be able to scan for other specific tags, hence the customizable concern. If we have to write a vb script to get it into excel I suppose we can do that.

Cheers,

Josh

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, I am not aware of any such tool, but it should not be too hard to put one together, maybe a useful little tool as well.

If you have all of your pages in spreadsheet or database, it should be  easy enough to write a little script that cycles through them.

Start Loop

• request page

• parse code to get canonical URL

• compare page to canonical

• output problem URLs

End Loop

Slightly over simplified and requires a list of all your URLs but would be willing to help put something like this together, could be useful for all of us, especially for those (like me) that work with a lot of CMS sites.

Cheers

Marcus

[prima-253509]

Hey Marcus,

thanks for the quick response. That is exactly what I would be looking for. I do have a list of url's and that is also simple enough to get from something like xenu. Would love to work with you on this.

Thanks.

Josh

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Josh,

Right, cool. I have got a few jobs to sort out but I am going to have a bash at knocking this up this afternoon. Should be easy enough (he said, damning himself to hours of problems).

Leave it with me for 24 hours.

Marcus

[prima-253509]

Great, really appreciate it!  Many thumbs up

[Dr-Pete]

I'm pretty sure that Screaming Frog SEO Spider will do it, but you need the paid version to custom-filter on the canonical tag. I've got a post going up about it tomorrow.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Dr. Pete, Joshua

I was just coming here to say that I had read the Dr. Pete post and this may do the job. It's a paid bit of a software but I will be picking it up later. I have my guys knocking up a canonical checker that will be free for all but that may take a day or so to get perfect.

Let me know if you have a play with Screaming Frog!

Marcus

[prima-253509]

Thanks Dr. Pete and Marcus.

I just finished reading the post. I have looked at Screaming Frog before but was hoping to be able to find a way to do it myself. Just didn't want to plop money down on something that seemed like it should be able to be done using tools I already had. But the software does look good. Any thought on if they will come out with a one time purchase instead of a yearly subscription?

Cheers!

Josh

[Dr-Pete]

No idea on that one - it's still pretty new. The developers actually chimed in on the post, so you could ask them in the comments.