How to fix it
Either remove the noindex from the canonical target or point the canonical at a page that is meant to be indexed.
When it is not a problem
Most often the canonical target was noindexed later, for a different reason, and nobody revisited the pages pointing at it. Decide which page should be the original and fix the other.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
- 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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