Canonical Query

[ThomasHarvey]

If Google decides to ignore your canonical and indexes numerous versions, does that count as duplicate content?

We've got a large amount of canonicals ignored by Google, so I'm just trying to gauge if it's an issue or not.

[LoganRay]

That's odd, I've never seen a case where Google ignored canonical tags. Since I don't have an example, I have to ask, are your canonical tags in the right place?

Another thing you might try, have you set up parameter handling in Search Console?

[ThomasHarvey]

Yeah they're definitely right, as a whole our canonicals Google agree with, but there's various batches that Google chooses to ignore.

Unfortunately I don't have access to search console, I have access to GA but that's it. I have to rely on third party tools and other things to try and see the impact. We also have a very restrictive platform which requires things to go through development. So i'm just trying to gauge the seriousness of this issue so that I can do a priority list.

To put the scale into perspective, it looks as if Google is ignoring the majority of our product URLs (thanks to a product recommendation software we use) and is using a different url path. Same with breadcrumbs.

255k indexed pages, ignored canonicals that i've found run to about 15k from just the two above.

[LoganRay]

Hmm...only other thing I can think of is your that XML sitemap may contain these additional URL strings, but I assume you've already got clean URLs there.

[ThomasHarvey]

Yep clean URLs there.

So, do you believe that Google ignoring these canonicals is something we should be worried about? (Basically setting a high priority so development sorts these issues out)

[LoganRay]

I believe you could be at risk of duplicate content issues. If it were my client, I'd definitely consider this a code-red issue and attack it from all possible angles.

[ThomasHarvey]

Thank you for your responses. Hopefully someone who may have experienced this before will be able to contribute. It seems there's very little in this area about the potential impacts.

[BlueprintMarketing]

It sounds to me like your problem is your CMS and your inability to access Google Webmaster tools. If you're going off of Google analytics, that's not going to tell you entire story. Use Moz, Deep Crawl, or screaming frog to determine other or not your canonicals are set up correctly.

It is possible that they're being blocked I some code error. And not being picked up by Googlebot.

Please run your site through the tools suggested and let me know if you need help in the form of somebody to run those tools for you I am willing to add that it is a code error, not Google deciding to ignore properly set up canonicals.

Google Analytics will show you whenever somebody has clicked on it does not mean that the bot is following that URL.

Without seeing more I really couldn't tell you much more unfortunately. If you can private message me with your domain if you'd like and I will check it out.

Hope this helps,Tom

Tom

[ThomasHarvey]

Hi Tom,

I use Moz, Screaming Frog and this canonical checker: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/canonical/dcckfeohihhlbeobohobibjbdobjbhbo?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog I'm sure that these canonicals are set up correctly.

I will send you an email to the email you have included on your profile.

Thanks,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hey Tom,

Thanks will check it out on Deep crawl hope to find out what is going on.

Tom

[ThomasHarvey]

Sent an email, have you received it?

[RuthBurrReedy]

Google can definitely choose to ignore the canonical tag, especially if they think that the page in question is a better solution to a query. I agree with the other respondents that the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level, so the duplicate content isn't an issue on  your site anymore. In the meantime, some things to try:

• Make sure that your internal hierarchy makes the canonical versions more important than the duplicate versions, i.e. they appear farther up in your site nav and have more internal links pointing to them.
• Try building some external links to those pages as well, where you can.
• Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.

Are any of the duplicate pages receiving organic search traffic? If not, it may be that Google has indexed them but understands they're not as important. Again, though, the best possible solution would be to fix this at a code level.

[ThomasHarvey]

Hi Ruth,

Appreciate your response. Trying to get these sorted at a code level, but we currently have six different issues all providing various issues, along with a variety of other features not working correctly. (The joys of working with a 10 year old system that is behind in a few areas)

You say the following:

• Make sure that the pages your canonical tags point to are very similar to the pages the tags are on - if they're too different, Google may decide they both need to be indexed.

Is it strange that the canonicals that are not the exact duplicates (category filters on ecommerce) are the main ones that are obeyed, the product canonicals (with exact duplicates, excluding changes to the breadcrumbs) are the ones being ignored.

There are pages that are receiving search traffic, but not a massive amount (atleast compared to the true versions of these pages, some of these pages get 10s to 100s of clicks, the canonical pages get thousands/tens of thousands)

Would a viable strategy to try and deal with these by redirecting these non-canonical urls to their canonical format? (short term until we can get issues sorted)

Final query, if Google ignores the canonical is this potentially going to be penalising us? If the answer is believed to be yes then it'll be a higher priority item to deal with.