How to fix it
Point the canonical at this page's own URL, or at the live page that should be treated as the original.
When it is not a problem
This is rarely a decision anyone made. It is a canonical generated from a URL rule that no longer matches the site, and the fix is the rule rather than the pages.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityCritical. It stops a page being read, indexed or reached at all, so it outranks everything cosmetic on the list.
- DetectionDetected by comparing pages against each other after the crawl finishes, because no single page can show it on its own.
- GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
- LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
- VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.
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