How to fix it
Keep exactly one canonical tag. Two plugins or a theme and a plugin each adding one is the usual cause.
When it is not a problem
Two identical canonicals are still two canonicals, and are still ignored. This is one of the few findings where the fix is unambiguous: exactly one tag, whatever it says.
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 on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
- 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.
Why the rule says this: Google's documentation states that multiple rel=canonical declarations are ignored.
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