Google Search Console error report

[AlexO]

Hey any of you know what this error means in your Google Search Console report?


"Alternate page with proper canonical tag
These pages aren't indexed or served on Google
First detected: 8/16/22Done fixing?
Affected pages
670"

[jag]

The real message is in the first line hon.

[24alex]

Hey any of you know what this error means in your Google Search Console report?


"Alternate page with proper canonical tag
These pages aren't indexed or served on Google
First detected: 8/16/22Done fixing?
Affected pages
670"

This to me is a problem of Google, if you use the same tags in the header.php on yopur WP site obviously there will be duplicates on pages, in your case you have 670 pages on your one blog with the same tags.

[tacnet]

You need to check which url you have in your canonical tag eg

Code: Select all

 <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html"/> 

The canonical tag just tells google that there is an alternative version of this page which is the version you would like indexed.

It could be that you just have several versions of your page available. For example, if you blog posts can be sorted in different orders then you dont want google to try and index every available sort option. So your canonical tag would just point to the default sort order

[monsta]

Hey any of you know what this error means in your Google Search Console report?


"Alternate page with proper canonical tag
These pages aren't indexed or served on Google
First detected: 8/16/22Done fixing?
Affected pages
670"

This to me is a problem of Google, if you use the same tags in the header.php on yopur WP site obviously there will be duplicates on pages, in your case you have 670 pages on your one blog with the same tags.

So on Wordpress what should I add in the header.php file not to offend Big G.

[vblogger]

You need to check which url you have in your canonical tag eg

Code: Select all

 <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mydomain.com/mypage.html"/> 

The canonical tag just tells google that there is an alternative version of this page which is the version you would like indexed.

It could be that you just have several versions of your page available. For example, if you blog posts can be sorted in different orders then you dont want google to try and index every available sort option. So your canonical tag would just point to the default sort order

how will you modify that to work across all pages on a WP blog?

[tacnet]

I dont know about header.php as we dont really use WP but this is NOT a google problem. Sites use canonical tags to try and steer google in the right direction when it crawls your site

Lets say you had a shop listing a bunch of items for sale and the default order was best selling. But on that page there were links so the user could sort the items in price ascending and price descending order. So you might have 3 pages like this :-

https://www.mydomain.com/shop/
https://www.mydomain.com/shop/ascending/
https://www.mydomain.com/shop/descending/

Google would see those as 3 seperate pages and index all 3 of them. But that's NOT what you want because its duplicate content and your splitting your page importance (link juice) accross 3 different pages. You want google to send all users (and the link juice) to the default page ie https://www.mydomain.com/shop/

In that case, you would add this to the <header> tag of all 3 pages

Code: Select all

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mydomain.com/shop/"/> 

This tells google to crawl the ascending and descending pages but to only index the default page. So all your link juice now goes to https://www.mydomain.com/shop/

You can remove the canonical tags altogether and just let google index everything but you may end up splitting your link juice accross multiple pages (and you might get penalised for having duplicate content)

Canonical tags are really only relevant if you have multiple versions of the same page and you want to steer google to one version. If its just a straight forward blog page then i cant see much use for them

Note google doesn't always follow canonical tags. If it sees that the canonical tag points to a page that is substantially different to the original page then it will ignore it

Hope that makes sense

[tacnet]

One more thing (and this could be relevant to WP users)

Make sure that WP is NOT just adding a default canonical tag to ALL you pages like this :-

Code: Select all

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mydomain.com/"/> 

That would mean google will only ever index your main page and completely ignore all your other pages.

In that case I would suggest removing the canonical tag altogether

If your unsure, just pm me a link and i will check it for you

[TheButcher]

Hmm time to check my sites .....