📘 This article explains how to determine if you have pages with canonical URLs that also canonicalize to different pages
Overview
Search engines can decide to ignore canonical tags for many reasons. Canonical tags that point to a page, which itself points to another page, indicate the canonical tag implementation on your website is not trustworthy. Use a URL Explorer report to determine if there are canonical chains on your website.
Creating a Canonical Report
To find the pages on your site that have canonical tags pointing to other pages, navigate to the "Distribution of Canonicals" chart on the Canonicals tab of SiteCrawler's Content report:
Click on the Canonical Different section to view a URL Explorer report of pages with canonical tags pointing to other pages and the pages they point to.
Add a filter with the following field to include only pages with another page pointing to them through their canonical tag: "Canonical from Exists".
Add a report column to show which pages the incoming canonical tag comes from:
The resulting report shows canonical chains. The URLs in the "Canonical From" column have a canonical tag pointing to the page in the first column (URL Card), which itself has a canonical tag pointing to the page in the "Canonical To" column:
You can export this report to have the full list of canonical chains to be resolved.
See also: