Canonicals: Unlinked

URLs that are only discoverable via rel=”canonical” and are not linked to via hyperlinks on the website.

This might be a sign of a problem with internal linking, or the URLs contained in the canonical.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Canonicals’ tab and ‘Unlinked’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Canonicals‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs are only discoverable via rel=”canonical” tags and are not linked to via hyperlinks on the website.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Has the canonical:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/froggy/">

But https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/froggy/ is not linked to from an <a> tag anywhere on the website (i.e. an orphan page).

How To Fix

Review the URLs contained in the rel=”canonical” and ensure they are linked to across the website where appropriate.

Canonical versions of URLs should be linked to, rather than non-canonical URLs. Incorrect canonicals should be updated to accurate canonical versions.