Page is not indexed: Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

  • Resolved polymathy

    (@polymathy)


    10 months ago

    Hi! I have the following issue:

    Whenever I redirect a page to a new URL, I get the following error in Google Search Console “Page is not indexed: Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user”.

    This only happens to me when using the Yoast plugin on a website. It seems that Yoast puts a canonical link on every page, that links to itself, if no canonical link has been set manually. Since Google still has the old URL in its index, it will think that that is the correct canonical instead of the one Yoast puts on the page.

    How can I prevent this from happening?

    • This topic was modified 10 months ago by polymathy.
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  • Plugin Support Maybellyne

    (@maybellyne)

    Hello @polymathy,

    Thanks for reaching out. By default, the Yoast SEO plugin uses self-referencing canonical URL, outputting the page URL as the canonical URL. If you want a page to use a different (custom) URL as the canonical URL, then you need to fill that in the canonical URL field of the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO meta box when you edit that page. You can learn more here.

    Regarding the notification you got from the Google Search Console:

    Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user: this page is marked as canonical for a set of pages, but Google thinks another URL makes a better canonical. Google has indexed the page that we consider canonical rather than this one.

    1. Inspect this URL to see the Google-selected canonical URL under Page indexing > Google-selected canonical.
    2. Look at the canonical you chose under Page indexing > User-declared canonical.
    3. In your browser, look at the current page, the user-declared canonical, and the Google-selected canonical.
    4. This error means that Google thinks that the tested page isn’t a duplicate of the user-declared canonical. Instead, Google thinks that the tested page is a duplicate of the Google-selected canonical.
      • If the Google-selected canonical is the tested page, then Google thinks that the tested page isn’t similar to any other pages.
      • If the user-declared canonical is not similar to the current page, then Google won’t ever choose that URL as canonical. A duplicate page must be similar to the canonical. (That’s what duplicate means.)
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