301 Redirect and Canonical link tag pointing in opposite directions!

[SWEMII]

I'm working on a site which redirects the non-WWW version to WWW version

so, for example  https://website.com/page redirects to https://www.website.com/page

However, canonical link tags have been set up on the page - pointing back to the non-WWW

so for example

Q - is this going to cause issues and should the canonical be updated to the same version as the redirect?

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

Yes, it could cause short term issues. Google will not understand which version you want to be shown in the results even though the user experience is the correct.
There is not that much work to update the canonical tags in order to be the same version.

Best luck.
GR

[brettmandoes]

Canonicals are not absolute directives, so Google will eventually sort out which of the two signals is more important. My guess is that the redirect takes precedence, because if they displayed the canonical to a user in search, it would be displaying a URL that sends users through a redirect which is a poor experience and they take pains not to do that.

When there are confusing signals like this out there, Google will do its best to sort out these issues and John Mueller has repeatedly stated "we do a pretty good job" at figuring it out, but he almost always adds a disclaimer that it's "better" to have a less confusing structure.

In plain english, it's not a catastrophic error, but it's something you need to clean up as part of your optimization efforts.

[KristinaKledzik]

As Brett and Gaston said, this is not ideal, but also not the worst thing. You'll probably have both non-WWW and WWW versions rank for awhile, then Google will start ignoring your canonicals.

As Gaston said, it's pretty simple to change canonicals - I would recommend doing that. Otherwise, you're showing Google that your canonicals don't match your actual site, and they may start ignoring them in the future. It's worth keeping your site structure clean!

Best,

Kristina