Google Search Console – Alternate page with proper canonical tag

  • Resolved Keith

    (@keithkhl)


    1 year, 3 months ago

    On google’s search console, I got ‘Alternate page with proper canonical tag’ error, for quite a lot of pages/posts.

    I changed the permalinks from WP’s /%category%/%post_id%/ to Permalink Manager’s /%Cateogry_Top%/%post_id%/, about 2-3 weeks ago. I installed Yoast SEO about a week ago. I added the website to Search Console about 5 days ago.

    I thought the WP’s native slug is completely gone, but most of my posts’ url are in native permalink format in Search Console.

    I guess it is partly due to incompatibility issue with Yoast, but I do not have full detail.

    • This topic was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by Keith.
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  • Plugin Author Maciej Bis

    (@mbis)

    Hi again Keith,

    The problem you are experiencing does not have to be related to Yoast SEO or Permalink Manager. If you check the HTML source of your website, you can see that all the URLs in both the sitemap and canonical meta to match the way they are set with the plugin.

    The same problem would occur if you changed your post’s permalinks with a different solution or plugin. It is because, Google may not always respect the your HTML code’s canonical meta tag, and there are other criteria and signals involved:

    https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization#canonical-how

    This could happen in your specific case, if there are high-authority domains that still have the old version of your URLs used as backlinks.

    Please also keep in mind that the fact that your URLs structure has changed does not automatically cause Google to index the new permalinks and deindex the old ones.

    Thread Starter Keith

    (@keithkhl)

    @mbis Thank you for the quick feedback. Guess I should’ve cleaned my sitemap before bothering you guys. It indeed came from Jetpack’s legacy sitemap. I thought Yoast took over and reconstructed all of them, but really didn’t know the legacy was still there.

    Thx bunch!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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