Auditing Canonicals With Screaming Frog

Go to the “issues” reports – Bulk Report – Issues – All

Some of the names of the reports can be confusing:

• The “canonicals missing inlinks” report – is a list of the pages missing canonical URLs, and the inlinks to those pages

• Canonicals Missing report – as you’d expect – shows you the pages without canonical URLs/tags
• Canonicals Canonicalised – has pages with canonical to a different URL. So you might have example.com/help/contact – canonicalised to example.com/help – which may or may not be a problem.

• Canonicals canonicalised inlinks – those pages with canonicals different to their own URL – the inlinks to those pages.

A general note/tip about using Screaming Frog.

Crawl with Text/HTML rendering only first – to make sure all links are crawlable without JS

Then crawl again with Crawl Configuration > Rendering set to JavaScript.

In the issues report, when you’ve run JS, you’ll be have new reports such as HTML Vs JS word count