- A common example would be your homepage maybe most people are typing in your website.com but they could also get there if they were to type in your website.com/index.html.
- Another common scenario is your website is accessible both with and without HTTPS.
So, when Google sees this it doesn't really know which version you prefer, to prefer the HTTP version or do you prefer the HTTPS which one should they pay attention to in the index and show in search results.
If you're getting a canonical error in Google search console. That's a sign that Google has some confusion as to which one they should pay attention to and that you're potentially sending mixed signals. A very common one that we see is the submitted URL not selected as a canonical warning and they describe that as the URL is one of a set of duplicate URLs without an explicitly marked canonical page.
You explicitly ask this URL to be indexed but because it is duplicate and Google thinks that another URL is a better candidate for this canonical URL. Google did not index this URL instead we index the canonical URL that we selected. So, Google found two pages that looked pretty much exactly the same. You didn't specify which version was the canonical and even though you submitted this file through your sitemap XML file in the search console. Google is ignoring it because it thinks the other version is the better version to show.
Now if you're not okay with that you should implement what's called a canonical tag and that looks something like this link <rel="canonical">. and then you specify the version of the URL that you want a search engine to pay attention to and index without that canonical tag.
Google doesn't have a clear directive as to which version they should pay attention to and they'll make their own decision.
Bing does something very similar as does Yahoo as do most major search engines.
So, the best thing you could do is to specify your canonical URL using the rel canonical tag but you also want to reduce the likelihood that a search engine is going to discover multiple variations in the first place don't allow people to access your website both with and without the www.
Decide which version you prefer and automatically redirect the other version to the preferred version. The same is true for HTTP versus HTTPS. A user should only be able to get to a single version of your page and any variation they may type in should automatically redirect them to the correct version. So, go ahead and implement those redirects so a single version is the only version that's successful.
If you're linking to URL multiple ways on your own website clean that up try to link consistently to a page.
If you have control over external links to your website, say you're listed on a Chamber of Commerce directory try to update those URLs as well so you're eliminating any variation and you're only linking to your page using your preferred canonical that being said as long as you have the canonical tag on the page.
The search engines will usually ignore a lot of those mixed signals and pay attention to your canonical URLs and only index the version that you want and as long as what you're seeing indexed is what you preferred. You could safely ignore some of these issues that are appearing in your search console. I hope that's helpful let us know if you have any questions in the comments and stay tuned for another more knowledge.
