Google Search Console Canonical Tag Exclusions??

Hello friends,

Yesterday I was in Google Search Console under "Coverage" checking to see if any pages on my site needed to be requested to be indexed. Then I stumbled across the section "Alternate page with proper canonical tag". I noticed that my service pages for my main city, about page, contact page and blog archive are all listed under this as excluded (see image below). Then when I select an individual URL and click "Inspect URL" I get redirected to the URL Inspection tab where it says "URL is not on Google". HOWEVER, all of these pages rank for multiple keywords on the first page of Google.... So, I'm extremely confused.



Any thoughts on this? Wondering if I should Request Indexing for all the URLs or just hang tight.

Cheers,
TBolts20

I can't give an exact answer since I'm not sure if you're using Wordpress, or just publishing your content on static HTML pages.

IMO, it seems like Google spiders are confused and are into a 'crawl loop' not being sure which to index.

I would suggest giving the proper canonical link to each of the page you wish to index.

Example:
<link rel="canonical" href="yoururl. com/blog/">

And your other page:
<link rel="canonical" href="yoururl. com/blog/blackhatworld">

And so on. For each page that you wish to index, add the canonical tag.

Had this and the problem was with the trailing slash.
example.com/blog and example.com/blog/ are two different pages. If you don't have redirects then both pages will show the same content and google will choose one page and the other will show the problem you have.

praetserge said:

Had this and the problem was with the trailing slash.
example.com/blog and example.com/blog/ are two different pages. If you don't have redirects then both pages will show the same content and google will choose one page and the other will show the problem you have.

Click to expand...

This makes sense because all the urls that are showing in GSC don't have the back slash. Then the urls that rank all have back slashes. So, you recommend adding a 301 redirect or is there no negative consequence leaving it as is?

TBolts20 said:

This makes sense because all the urls that are showing in GSC don't have the back slash. Then the urls that rank all have back slashes. So, you recommend adding a 301 redirect or is there no negative consequence leaving it as is?

Click to expand...

I did some reading and checked other sites near me.

My understanding is that it's irrelevant but 2 points to take into account:
1. If you have 2 pages (with and without the trailing slash), google will select 1 page and consider it as the canonical and basically ignore the other, so no problem. If your theme is set up correctly then every url on your site will have canonical tag.
2. Links, that's where a problem arises. Imagine you build links to example.com/page1 and google ranks example.com/page1/, no link juice is passed to example.com/page1/... you see the point?

What I did:
To keep link juice and avoid 2 url's showing the same page, I set up 301 redirect.
Just do a simple search online on how to redirect... I'm not a programmer and I've done it.