Anyone else spotted their pages getting ignored by Google with Search Console citing canonical errors as the reason? Been shown two sites that have this for almost all pages.
States Page is not indexed: Alternative page with proper canonical tag and when I look at the user-declared canonical field, it always just shows the issue index.
Bumping this as support have implied there’s no issue but we’re seeing the majority of our URLs delisted in Google Search Console explicitly because every page in the publication has a canonical pointing to the cover page (which in most cases has no content to speak of).
Out of curiosity, I dipped into the examples to see how other, bigger players are faring and settled on Complex who use it on their stories.complex.com subdomain.
Looking at Google, I can see that a number of their stories are indexed - probably due to very extensive inbound linking. But not a single sub-page. And furthermore, I can copy any given piece of text from any of their features and be pretty much certain that Google will not return the page.
I also notice that for a great many of their ‘stories’ publications, they’ve taken an approach of not using sub-pages at all but putting all their content on a single page – wondering if that’s because of these issues specifically.
Current experiment. I’ve added this to the code editor. It works but of course only on load. Not sure how GoogleBot will see that. Maybe theres a way to make it watch the URL for changes and re-run?
<script type="text/javascript">
document.querySelector("link[rel='canonical']").href = window.location.href;
</script>`