Most of the time, nothing needs doing. The status means the URL’s canonical tag names a different page, and Google followed it and indexed that page instead. For tracking, sorted and print versions of a page, that is the right outcome. If a page you want customers to find is on the list, its tag is pointing the wrong way: correct the tag.
How to tell whether a URL on the list is a problem
The total tells you very little. A site with a few dozen pages can easily produce hundreds of copies without anyone noticing: a quote link with a campaign code, a news page sorted by date, a WordPress tag archive, a print view of a service page.
Open the status in the Page indexing report and ask one question of each example URL. Is it a copy of another page, or a page with content of its own?
The URL itself is the quickest clue. Most copies have a ? and a parameter on the end, such as ?sort=oldest. A clean address you would want a customer to land on is the one to fix: its own tag told Google to skip it, and Google obliged.
Keep an eye on the count over time as well. If it jumps straight after a theme update or a new plugin, check what changed in your page templates.
Why “proper” doesn’t mean correct
Google’s description says the page “correctly points to the canonical page, which is indexed, so there is nothing you need to do.” That covers two checks: the tag names another page, and that page is indexed. Nothing checks that it is the page you intended.
Google treats a canonical tag as “a hint, not a rule,” used to choose between pages that look alike. So a wrong tag lands a page here when it points at something similar, and templates produce a lot of similar pages. Google’s 2013 article on common canonical mistakes and its troubleshooting guide describe the usual causes:
- A tag carried over with a templateGoogle warns that copying a template can copy its canonical tag too. Clone one location page to make 30 more, and all 30 can end up naming the first.
- Page 2 pointing at page 1Google says a canonical from page 2, or any later page, to page 1 is not correct. Your news or case-study archive loses everything past the first page.
- A category page pointing at one articleGoogle advises against it. The category page, say your sectors overview, drops out in favour of a single post.
- A plugin writing the wrong tagGoogle notes that some CMS plugins “can make incorrect use of canonicalization techniques.” On WordPress, check what your SEO plugin writes on custom post types such as offices or vacancies.
A URL on this list is not indexed, so it cannot appear in Google Search. It cannot be a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode either, because Google requires a page to be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.” For a copy that does not matter: the page it names shows instead. For a location page clients search for, it is the same loss as a page that is crawled but not indexed.
How to fix alternate page with proper canonical tag
Do this only for the pages with content of their own.
- See what the page namesPut the URL into URL Inspection in Search Console. User-declared canonical is the address your page names. Google-selected canonical is the one Google kept.
- Find what writes the tagOpen the page in your browser’s developer tools and search the head for rel="canonical". Then track down the template, plugin setting or SEO field that fills it in. If a CMS plugin gets it wrong, raise it with the plugin’s developer.
- Point it at the page itselfA real page should name its own address.
- Fix the template, then check its siblingsIf one template wrote the wrong tag, every page built from it shares the fault. Open two or three of them and check their tags before calling it done.
- Ask Google to look againRequest indexing for a page or two (there is a daily limit), or press Validate fix for the group. Validation “typically takes up to about two weeks.” If Google has not crawled a page at all yet, that is a different status: discovered - currently not indexed.
Avoid two fixes that look tempting. Do not block the copies in robots.txt: Google says “don’t use the robots.txt file for canonicalization purposes,” and a blocked URL can still be indexed from links elsewhere. And do not add noindex to force a choice, because noindex “will completely block the page from Search.”
Should every page have a canonical tag?
It is not compulsory. Google says your site “will likely do just fine without specifying a canonical preference.” We would add one anyway. Google recommends a self-referencing tag on the canonical page itself, and it settles every tracking or sorted copy of that page in advance.
This is what it looks like. It goes in the head of the page’s HTML, with the full address:
In the head of example.co.uk/services/office-cleaning
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.co.uk/services/office-cleaning">Format from Google’s guide to consolidating duplicate URLs. Relative addresses work, but Google recommends the full one, and a tag placed in the body is ignored.
Alternate page compared with the other canonical statuses
Search Console has three canonical statuses that are easy to confuse. This is the only one where Google did what your tag asked. When Google indexed a different URL from the one your tag names, that is duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user.
Checking that every page your customers need is indexed under the address you chose is part of our work for service businesses, on one plan at £1,750 a month.
Questions
What is a canonical page?
It is the single URL Google keeps when it finds several that look the same: the one it chose as “the most representative from a set of duplicate pages.” The rest stay out of Search.
Does a long list of alternate URLs hurt my rankings?
No. They are copies Google has set aside in favour of the page they name. Google says “some duplicate content on a site is normal and it’s not a violation of Google’s spam policies.”