Referring Pages in Search Console

[dave101]

When you fetch a page using search console, that has yet to be indexed, if you scroll down to the section "Coverage" then to Referring page.

Is it normal under, Referring Page section, for the domain to show up twice? Like

https://www.example.com/
https://example.com/

 

[Phil Rozek]

@dave101, I'd say no, unless maybe you changed your canonicalization recently.

On the one hand, all kinds of URLs may show up as the "referring page," or as one of several referring pages, just because those are the URLs where Googlebot happened to crawl the (not-yet-indexed) new page you're looking at.

On the other hand, if it was a recent crawl, the current / canonical version of the page should be the one showing up under "referring pages."

What I'd do here is fetch/inspect other URLs, both un-indexed and indexed, and see if the same issue keeps popping up. If this isn't just an outlier, it's probably a canonical snafu. (In that case I'd also wonder whether the XML sitemap or internal links point to the old version of the page.)