a single source, nothing corroborates it

Send one canonical signal and stop arguing

Every signal you emit should point at the same version of a page: the canonical tag, the internal links, the sitemap entry and any redirect. Treat the alternate page notice in Search Console as information rather than a defect, since it fires when someone links to a parameter version of a page that correctly points at itself. Where you genuinely want a duplicate gone, redirect it instead of canonicalising it.

The method

1. 01

   Check a page's canonical by viewing source and searching the code for the word canonical, or with a browser extension, rather than relying only on Search Console.

2. 02

   Treat the alternate page with proper canonical report in Search Console as a notice rather than a defect, because it fires when your page correctly points at itself and someone else linked to a parameter version of it.

3. 03

   Mine that same report for the one thing you control: internal links that point at parameter or duplicate URLs, and repoint them at the clean canonical version.

4. 04

   When you genuinely do not want a duplicate URL to exist at all, replace the canonical tag with a 301 or 308 redirect so the old URL's ranking weight moves to the new one.

5. 05

   If Google's pick is the better page, do three things: strip canonical tags from the dead URLs, point every remaining variant at Google's version, and redirect the dead URLs there.

What it returned

• Search Console reports the canonical from the last crawl, which may not be what is live on the site right now.

• Hackernoon linked to detailed.com/tech-blogs/ with a ref= parameter appended, so the parameter URL landed in the report while the clean URL kept its self-referencing canonical. Glen Allsopp says almost every site on the web will have URLs in this report.

• Glen Allsopp gives the counter-example of linking from his own homepage to /tech-blogs/?ref=hackernoon.com instead of the bare /tech-blogs/ URL.

• Glen Allsopp warns that trying to force Google's hand is unlikely to work on its own.

Sources

• How to Fix 'Alternate Page with Proper Canonical' in Google Search Console - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · How to Find the Canonical URL for Any Page · 2023-10-19
• Fixing 'Duplicate, Google Chose a Different Canonical' in Google Search Console - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · When to Change Your Declared Canonical · 2023-10-23
• Encoded URLs, Canonical Tags & Special Characters for SEO: A Deep-Dive - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · Reserved Characters for URL Syntax · 2023-06-18
• How 16 Companies are Dominating the World's Google Search Results (2024 Edition) - Detailed.comGlen Allsopp · detailed.com · One Affiliate Article, Three Hearst Websites. When You Have Multiple Brands, You Can Share a Single Story Across Them. · 2023-03-07