Canonicalised Links or Pages

At a glance

The community member is having issues with their website's home page not ranking on Google, while some other pages are ranking well. They learned through an SEO tool that many pages are marked as duplicates, and they want to understand how to change these tags. The comments suggest that the issue may be related to the website being available on both www and non-www versions, and a canonical tag being set on all pages, which is not recommended. The community members discuss potential solutions, such as removing the canonical tag and setting up a redirect to the preferred version of the website (www or non-www).

Useful resources

LLiso

Hello I was looking at why my home page https://soldati.co.za was not ranking on google but some of the pages on the site were ranking like https://soldati.co.za/work/mangethethe when i search mangethethe it reasonably high and even the site I created is acually top but my site home page wont show up when i search Soldati.

Through Screaming Frog SEO Spider I learned that many pages are marked as duplicates and thus wanted to understand where I can change these tags as I a still learning this website staff

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9 comments

JJohn Siciliano

Canonical is something on the todo list right now. But I don't think the issue you are facing would be solved by canonical. Maybe im wrong.

Canonical helps if you have two identical or very similar pages and it informs google which one is the primary one.

In your case, it doesn't appear those two pages are duplicate or even similar. Rather it seems Google is choosing the work page as the one they want to show over home

JJohn Siciliano

Huh looks like you have a canonical. howd you add that

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JJohn Siciliano

Your site is available and www and non-www that's an issue

JJohn Siciliano

This <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.soldati.co.za/"> is outputting on every page which isn't good

LLiso

Hello John,
Thanks for the quick response.

Indeed I don't have identical pages

So how do I ensure the site outputs on both without getting into this issue . Is there like a redirect of the www or something i should be doping on my DNS with cloudflare

LLiso

and is it this duplication that makes certain pages or most pages not indexable

JJohn Siciliano

Idk could be multiple issues. Start by removing that canonical. I think you added it to the head html which outputs on all pages

JJohn Siciliano

To redirect do this.

Add dummy record for the version you don't want to use. In my case i want to redirect www to bare so added it for www. Cloudflare dummy record has specific IP reference this screenshot

Add redirect rule (attached)

I really need to add this to a doc

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JJohn Siciliano

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Canonicalised Links or Pages