Duplicate without user-selected canonical OPTIONS

[Clay Carson]

Wondering what best practice would be for pages that Google Search Console has marked 'Duplicate without user-selected canonical'.

Took a careful look at the pages, trying to see what the issue was. Came up with some patterns.
1. The site originally did not have SSL, predated that. SSL added about a year or two ago and most of the pages that Google says are duplicate without user selected canonicals are displaying as http, not https. I'm wondering if the switchover was done with no canonical added to all the pages. Our webhost did the SSL implementation, we weren't directly involved. I asked them to check but they show only one file on cpanel and the rep I spoke with wasn't very familiar with Search Console.
2. About half of the pages were wp-content uploads. The original version of Wordpress showed a low resolution photo on the page or blog post, and clicking on the photo allowed a separate URL for a high resolution photo. Have heard that that isn't wonderful for SEO, since that really does create a URL with 'thin content' by definition. The WP update no longer creates those pages, so I'm guessing they got a hint it was hurting rankings.
3. About half of the pages are tag pages. Again, by definition, a tag page pulls out posts with that tag, so maybe that is considered duplicate content? Seems odd Google would punish a system like tagging

So, would you just ignore this?
Or add a canonical to the pages that display instead? (All of the SSL version pages are displaying correctly)
Or is it worth deleting the duplicate pages? They do not appear in WP admin.

Any insight would be appreciated!

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Hi @Clay Carson! A few questions:

1. I'm assuming you've done this already, but just to be safe, have you verified that https property is present in Google Search Console? The reason I'm asking is it sounds like two years ago, you didn't have the SSL installed and it is very possible that Google would have only verified the only property that was available which was the http property.
2. Similar to #1, does your website use the "www" prefix? If so, whenever the site was validated in GSC, it may have only validated the www subdomain and not the root domain.
3. Have you submitted the https: version of your sitemap in GSC?
4. As you are using Wordpress, are you also using Yoast or Rankmath? Either one of those should create a self-referencing canonical for each page.
5. Have you created 301 redirects for all the non-existing pages to another page?

 

[Clay Carson]

Hi @Clay Carson! A few questions:

1. I'm assuming you've done this already, but just to be safe, have you verified that https property is present in Google Search Console? The reason I'm asking is it sounds like two years ago, you didn't have the SSL installed and it is very possible that Google would have only verified the only property that was available which was the http property.
2. Similar to #1, does your website use the "www" prefix? If so, whenever the site was validated in GSC, it may have only validated the www subdomain and not the root domain.
3. Have you submitted the https: version of your sitemap in GSC?
4. As you are using Wordpress, are you also using Yoast or Rankmath? Either one of those should create a self-referencing canonical for each page.
5. Have you created 301 redirects for all the non-existing pages to another page?

Jeff, good questions.

1. Yes, the https property shows in Search Console. Only added it after SSL was installed.
2. We added the root domain.
3. Yoast created 5 sitemaps in Wordpress, authors, posts, pages, categories and tags. They all show in GSC.
4. Wordpress with Yoast. I thought so, too. Where does the rel canonical show up in the code?
5. I'm not sure I understand the question. There are no non existing pages. There are duplicates, per Google. Have not created any 301 redirects....

 

[JeffClevelandTN]

Jeff, good questions.

1. Yes, the https property shows in Search Console. Only added it after SSL was installed.
2. We added the root domain.
3. Yoast created 5 sitemaps in Wordpress, authors, posts, pages, categories and tags. They all show in GSC.
4. Wordpress with Yoast. I thought so, too. Where does the rel canonical show up in the code?
5. I'm not sure I understand the question. There are no non existing pages. There are duplicates, per Google. Have not created any 301 redirects....

Hi Clay,

Regarding #5, thanks for the clarification, it sounds like you were referring to non-existing pages showing up in GSC but no longer on your site.

Or is it worth deleting the duplicate pages? They do not appear in WP admin.

So, those pages existed at some time before and it would be best practice to setup 301 redirects. You can do this in yoast, but you would need the premium plugin. There are lots of free WP plugins that allow you to manually create those redirects too. You may want to also look at RankMath as an alternative to Yoast as it has quite a bit of other functionality in their free version than Yoast including redirection. When you have the 301's configured, you want to go back to GSC and report them as fixed.

Look at your source code of any page, you should find something like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page/" />

Just search for "canonical" (with the quotes) as there should only be one occurence in the code. As mentioned earlier, Yoast should do this automatically for you but you can manually override the self-canonical in Yoast if needed.

Have you checked to make sure that for any given page, that all url formats resolve properly? For example, all the following examples go to the same place and none return a 404:

You just need to test one page on your site. If you get a 404 for any of those formats, then you will need to modify your .htaccess file. If you aren't comfortable in doing this, some of the better hosting providers will do this if you submit a support ticket such as SiteGround.

Regarding #3, please confirm that GSC is showing the https version of your sitemaps. It may have all the sitemaps that Yoast has created, but if they are not the https version, you'll want to submit those manually.

 

[bdlowery]

Can you link the site and the pages that are experiencing the canonical issue? That would be the easiest way to solve the problem.

 

[Clay Carson]

When you say 'link the site and the pages', do you mean doing a 301 redirect?

 

[Clay Carson]

Hi Clay,

Regarding #5, thanks for the clarification, it sounds like you were referring to non-existing pages showing up in GSC but no longer on your site.


So, those pages existed at some time before and it would be best practice to setup 301 redirects. You can do this in yoast, but you would need the premium plugin. There are lots of free WP plugins that allow you to manually create those redirects too. You may want to also look at RankMath as an alternative to Yoast as it has quite a bit of other functionality in their free version than Yoast including redirection. When you have the 301's configured, you want to go back to GSC and report them as fixed.

Look at your source code of any page, you should find something like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page/" />

Just search for "canonical" (with the quotes) as there should only be one occurence in the code. As mentioned earlier, Yoast should do this automatically for you but you can manually override the self-canonical in Yoast if needed.

Have you checked to make sure that for any given page, that all url formats resolve properly? For example, all the following examples go to the same place and none return a 404:

You just need to test one page on your site. If you get a 404 for any of those formats, then you will need to modify your .htaccess file. If you aren't comfortable in doing this, some of the better hosting providers will do this if you submit a support ticket such as SiteGround.

Regarding #3, please confirm that GSC is showing the https version of your sitemaps. It may have all the sitemaps that Yoast has created, but if they are not the https version, you'll want to submit those manually.

Jeff,
We have the premium Yoast.

Have you checked to make sure that for any given page, that all url formats resolve properly? For example, all the following examples go to the same place and none return a 404:

Will check, have not bothered to check before, thanks.

Regarding #3, please confirm that GSC is showing the https version of your sitemaps. It may have all the sitemaps that Yoast has created, but if they are not the https version, you'll want to submit those manually.

Will double check and let you know. Much appreciated!

 

[bdlowery]

When you say 'link the site and the pages', do you mean doing a 301 redirect?

I mean paste the link to your site here that is experiencing the problem, and the pages that are throwing the error.