Alternate page with proper canonical tag: what does it mean and how to fix it?

 

An alternate page with proper canonical tag is a page on your website that is a duplicate of another page, but has a canonical tag pointing to the preferred version of the page. This tells Google which version of the page to index and rank in search results.

The canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred one. It is used to avoid duplicate content issues, which can occur when there are multiple pages on a website with the same or similar content.

There are a few reasons why you might have duplicate pages on your website. For example, you might have a product page that is accessible from multiple URLs, such as the product category page, the product search results page, and the product landing page. Or, you might have a blog post that is accessible from the blog homepage, the blog archive, and the blog post category page.

In these cases, you can use the canonical tag to tell search engines which version of the page is the preferred one. This will help to avoid duplicate content issues and ensure that the correct version of the page is indexed and ranked in search results.

How to fix the "alternate page with proper canonical tag" status

If you see the "alternate page with proper canonical tag" status in Google Search Console, it means that Google has found duplicate pages on your website that are properly canonicalized. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but there are a few things you can do to check if everything is set up correctly:

1. Review the pages that are listed in the report. Make sure that the canonical tags are pointing to the correct pages. If you find any pages that shouldn't be canonicalized, update the canonical link to point to itself.
2. Check your internal linking structure. Make sure that all of your internal links are pointing to the preferred version of each page.
3. Use a robots.txt file to block duplicate pages from being crawled and indexed. This is especially important if you have duplicate pages that are not canonicalized.

Here are some additional tips for using canonical tags effectively:

• Use the canonical tag on all pages of your website, including product pages, blog posts, and category pages.
• Make sure that the canonical tag points to the preferred version of each page.
• Avoid using the canonical tag on pages that are not accessible to search engines.
• Be careful not to use too many canonical tags on a single page. This can confuse search engines and lead to indexing problems.