Canonical Tags increased after putting the appropriate tag?

[ggpaul562]

Hey, I noticed that the number of duplicate title tags increased from 14k to 30k in Google Search Console. These dup title tags derived from having the incorrect canonical tags. For instance,

http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens

These two are the same exact pages with two parameters (These are not unisex by the way).

Anyway, when I viewed the page source, it had the parameter in the canonical tag so.... it would look like this

So whether it be

http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Mens
http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/?d=Womens

The canonical tag had the "?d=Womens"

I figured that wasn't best practices, so for the canonical tag I removed the parameter so now the canonical tag is http://www.site.com/product-name/product-code/  for that specific page with parameter (if that makes sense).

My question is, why did my number of errors doubled after what I thought fixed the solution?

[ThompsonPaul]

It's entirely possible the crawler hadn't finished discovering/indexing all the dupe pagesURLs until after you'd added the further confusion to the canonicals. If it in fact had another 15,000 urls to crawl, it almost certainly wouldn't have accomplished that in one (or even a few) visits.

P.

[ggpaul562]

Thank you Thompson.

There are 400,000 pages :(.

[MattRoney]

Hi Paul! It sounds like ThompsonPaul has answered your question. Are you all set, or can we be of more help?