The same content can open at more than one address: with and without www, on http and https, with a slash at the end or without, or with ?colour=blue after it. To Google, those are different pages with the same text. The canonical tag tells it which is the main version to keep and show. It is a hint, not an order: Google may choose another.
What it looks like, and where it goes
It sits inside the page’s <head>, and each page points to its own address:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourcompany.com/colour-guide/">
This is called a self-referencing canonical. On a WordPress site, the SEO plugin and WordPress itself already write it. Check: open the page, view the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for canonical.
Choosing and tidying up, step by step
| 1 |
Pick one form of the site address and stay with it: https and with or without www. Only one.
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| 2 |
Redirect the other forms to it with a 301. The tag alone does not replace the redirect. See 301 redirects.
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| 3 |
Use the same address everywhere (in WordPress settings, in the sitemap, in internal links) and in Search Console.
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| 4 |
Check pages that have variants: filters, sort orders, addresses with campaign tags. They should point the canonical at the clean address. See UTM links.
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| 5 |
See what Google chose in URL Inspection: it shows the canonical “declared by you” and the one “selected by Google”.
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What the Search Console statuses say
| Status |
What it usually is |
| Alternate page with proper canonical tag |
A variant pointing to the main one. That is correct. |
| Duplicate without user-selected canonical |
Google found duplicates and none says which is the main one. Add the canonical. |
| Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user |
Your hint was ignored because the content or the links pointed to another. Look at which version the site’s links use. |
| Page with redirect |
The address redirects; the indexed one is the destination. Normal. |
Three mistakes that cost dearly. Pointing every page’s canonical at the home page (Google stops seeing the others). Mixing canonical and noindex on the same page, which give opposite signals. And pointing a version in another language at the main one: each language is its own canonical (see several languages and hreflang).
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Pages of a long list (page 2, page 3) should point to themselves, not to page 1. And in shops, filters generate thousands of variants: see getting a shop found on Google.
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Does your site address open in two versions and you do not know how to join them? Tell us the domain and we will look at the server configuration.
Open a support ticket
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