Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded in Google webmaster tools.
-
In Google Webmaster Tools, I have a coverage issue. I am getting this error message: Alternate page with proper canonical tag Status: Excluded.
It gives the below blog post page as an example. Any idea how to resolve? At one time, I was using handl utm grabber, but the plugin is deactivated on my website.
-
I was also facing the same issue in Google web Master on my following page:
https://getsassastatus.co.za/sassa-payment-date/If you have resolved the issue plz let me know it might be helpful for me.
Thanks -
@Alancito I am also getting the same in
mypropertypedia
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Can I influence the Google Selected Canonical
Our company recently rebranded and launched a new website. The website was developed by an overseas team and they created the test site on their subdomain. The only problem is that Google crawled and indexed their site and ours. I noticed Google indexed their sub domain ahead of our domain and based on Search Console it has deemed our content as the duplicate of theirs and the Google selected theirs as the canonical.
Community | | Spaziohouston
The website in question is https://www.spaziointerni.us
What would be the best course of action to get our content ranked and selected instead of being marked as the duplicate?
Not sure if I have to modify the content to make it more unique or have them submit a removal in their search console.
Our indexed pages continue to go down due to this issue.
Any help is greatly appreciated.1 -
Missing Canonical Tag for a PDF document
Error: Missing Canonical Tag
Technical SEO | | ahmadmdahshan
But URL is not a webpage it is a PDF document, is this fixable?0 -
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to Google Ads costs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
Paid Search Marketing | | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Naturally this si reflected in ""Duplicate without user-selected canonical” . Issue
We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check. Question: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to SERPs
Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
International SEO | | Alex_Pisa
We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Goal
We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links. Current solution
Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Issue
After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example): User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs. Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google. Question: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.0 -
Home Page Title - Google Overriding my Title Tag
Hi, We have noticed our home page title tag has now been replaced by our brand name (by Google I'm assuming). We have also noted that the page is dropping off SERPS for our main keywords, I suspect they are related but ofc I cant be sure. I know the recent Google update has impacted titles but I wasn't sure if it would apply here. Has anyone any advice on this and/or having the same issue? We normally rank well for grass seed (UK search) https://thegrasspeople.com/ I also noticed some strange mark up in our source code which seems to have been left behind by Sketch - we are getting this removed. <title>Combined Shape</title> <desc>Created with Sketch.</desc> Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris_Mc0 -
Why does Google rank a product page rather than a category page?
Hi, everybody In the Moz ranking tool for one of our client's (the client sells sport equipment) account, there is a trend where more and more of their landing pages are product pages instead of category pages. The optimal landing page for the term "sleeping bag" is of course the sleeping bag category page, but Google is sending them to a product page for a specific sleeping bag.. What could be the critical factors that makes the product page more relevant than the category page as the landing page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
How do you check the google cache for hashbang pages?
So we use http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:x.com/#!/hashbangpage to check what googlebot has cached but when we try to use this method for hashbang pages, we get the x.com's cache... not x.com/#!/hashbangpage That actually makes sense because the hashbang is part of the homepage in that case so I get why the cache returns back the homepage. My question is - how can you actually look up the cache for hashbang page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | navidash0 -
Alternative Link Detox tools?
My company is conducting a link detox for a client, and it seems like every tool we utilize is giving us a different answer on how many links we actually have. the numbers range anywhere from 4,000 to 200,000. Does anyone have any suggestions as to what tools will give us an accurate count, and will also email the webmasters on your behalf requesting the links removal? We are trying to have this process be as automated as possible to save time on our end.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lightwurx0