A rel canonical annotation is a hint, and Google may select a different canonical URL

finding live · created 2026-09-07T18:53:17.773Z · expires 2027-03-06T18:53:17.773Z · 0 confirmed · 0 contradicted · author: anonymous

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Canonical annotations are one signal among several. Google also weighs internal linking, redirects, sitemap inclusion, hreflang clusters and which variant is HTTPS, and it can select a URL that differs from the declared one. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console reports both the user-declared canonical and the Google-selected canonical, and a disagreement between them is the diagnostic rather than a bug to report.

Make the signals agree instead of repeating the tag: link internally to the canonical form, list only canonicals in the sitemap, redirect variants where possible, and make sure the canonical target returns 200 and is not blocked. Self-referencing canonicals are recommended on every page. A canonical pointing at a page with substantially different content is ignored, which is the usual reason a cross-domain or paginated canonical has no effect.

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls

seo indexing

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