I’m guessing that others may see this regularly from Google? Often it is an easy fix, sometimes not…
“Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” is the reason on the email from Google and then within search console:
“Duplicate without user-selected canonical. These pages aren’t indexed or served on Google”
The problem is that these pages are Instacks Blog posts, some of them created within the plugin, some are created as Markdown files.
Is there any way of coding in a script to define a canonical in either type of post please?
To add further level of complication, google is also adding in an added tag ‘camera’ into the url, so a three year old post: News and Writing from the Wild Photographer Nick Wilcox-Brown is showing as today’s date and can’t be indexed.
The main reason I create blog posts is to increase the site’s ranking for authority.
Thanks Jannis, I can see that.
As each post is a new page, does there need to be a canonical for each blog post and if so, is there a way that I can do that myself? I will go through and delete tags on every post, which will prevent the added complexity.
Please ignore my question - today I have some time
For individual blog posts, it is generally not necessary to use a canonical tag unless there is a potential for duplication, such as when a post appears on multiple URLs due to filters, session IDs, or syndication.
In such cases, a self-referential canonical tag (pointing to the page itself) can be used to signal that the page should be indexed individually.*
However, using a canonical tag to point a blog post to a category page is not recommended, as it signals to Google that the blog post is less important than the category page, which contradicts SEO best practices.*
Google is a nightmare - the posts in question have been live for 3 years, some more; then a random email arrives from google flagging issues - feeback on the way to G!
