Canonical tag issues & fixes

Most canonical problems are not bugs in the ordinary sense — they are mismatched signals. You tell a search engine one thing with your rel=canonical tag, and something else with your redirects, your sitemap, your internal links, or your robots directives, and the engine has to decide which signal to trust.

Because the canonical tag is a hint rather than a directive, Google is free to choose a different canonical than the one you declared, and it reports that decision back to you in the Search Console Page indexing report. The pages below explain each canonical status and scenario you are likely to meet: what it means, why it happens, whether it is actually a problem, and exactly how to resolve it.