Canonical tool.
Use the canonical tool to check if a page has a canonical tag and to find out which page should be index by search engines based on the canonical location.
The syntax used for a canonical tag:
- HTML Mark-up = <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://example.com/page.html”/>
- HTTP header = Link: <http://www.seoreviewtools.com/canonical-url-location-checker/>; rel=”canonical”
The canonical tag is supported by:Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
UPDATE: This tool now also supports / checks the HTTP Canonical headers
Extra resources
- Canonical HTTP header tag “Test page” – http://www.seoreviewtools.com/tests/canonical-header.php
- General explanation canonical tag- http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
- HTTP header canonical tag – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html
Read the official blogpost by Google on Google Webmaster Central: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html or watch the video explanation from Matt Cutts:
Tool limitations
- This tool is unable to execute JavaScript and therefore unable to check JavaScript inserted tags.
Thanks for the tool guys! And an interesting fact, that 15% of Google searches are absolutely new….
Very helpfull tool. Thanks a lot
Hey Admin,
Is there any restriction for this tool to check the canonical URL’s.?
For a project which i was working. I was not able to test more than 400 URL’s. and i was not registered to this site at that point of time. was it a reason ?
Hi, I use a 18 request restriction for all the tools to balance the number of daily API calls.
I your case I would recommend using the SEO List Crawler, because it enables you to check a 1.000 at once (including the canonical tag).
Success!
URL Canonicalization seems to be quite new topic to me, being a newbie. Although, I have read some guides, but still I have one confusion, Do I need to add the URL Canonical Tag to every page of my site?
Hi Jasvinder,
It’s considered to be a best practice to add a canonical to every page. Because this prevents search engines from indexing URLs with query parameters or other URL variations (duplicate content) you don’t like to be indexed.
This tool does not properly read the source code and extrapolate the rel canonicals , please fix.
Hey Paul,
What URLs did you use to perform a canonical check? So I can replicate your results.
Thanks
Hey Paul,
Thanks for the pointing this out, it’s actually not a real bug but the tool isn’t able to extract canonical tags generated using JavaScript. This is a limitation for this tool and I’ll add it to the description. According to this test search engines are able to pick up your canonical tag and they will function as expected. Check out this article for further background information on this subject: http://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157
Updated video embed link.
Thanks for a great tool guys, this one is really useful.
Cheers!
Loz
UPDATE: This tool now also supports / checks the HTTP Canonical headers
Update:
Special thanks to Klaus S. Madsen for pointing out these issues.
thanks for the tool !!