SEO Error Alternate Page With Proper Canonical Tag

Notice how all these URLs have ?pr_prod in the URL? That is from Shopify's recommended product links used for tracking purposes. Though Google can see parameters in the URL, they recognize the canonical page is the one you want indexed.

As I mentioned in this article, you may see this in Search Console for a few other reasons (e.g. variant URLs) but ultimately you can ignore this non-issue.

From Google's docs:
"Duplicate or alternate pages shouldn't be indexed. Having a page marked duplicate or alternate is usually a good thing; it means that we've found the canonical page and indexed it."

Ilana Davis, Shopify Superhero
JSON-LD for SEO, adds structured data to your theme, getting you more organic traffic with Rich Results.

gracelace · ‎05-05-2024

Hello, I think you have missed or overlooked one point. This issue or "non" issue causes other underlying problems in GSC. It confuses which page it should actually reference. So it takes what would be the primary page and will no index it because it has no idea what page should or shouldn't be indexed. Currently I have over 6k pages with canonical tag errors and over 1.4k pages with redirect. Many of which is trying or tried to put the page with the variant search garbage as the primary so it is confused and will not index the primary. I can only ask for re-index of 10 pages daily in GSC which means it will take me 145 days to get through the 1.4k as of today's date. If it grows, so does my days of index requesting. The support team cannot and/or will not help. The technical team first blamed this issue on GSC, stating that they created the links and not Shopify. Then they came back and said that the technical team said, and I quote "complex to resolve" and I should hire an expert. So, I have to hire someone from and expert within or outside shopify to fix an issue they've created? There HAS to be a fix in place to clean this up! Last month my canonical errors was 4.5k today, 6.0k. At this rate I'll never catch up. Also, while you mention that GSC will ignore this and we should also, there are other docs that GSC states that an over abundance of canonical errors, page redirects WILL actually affect ranking results. Please, please provide me some help how to resolve it. I don't want to ignore it.

ilanadavis · ‎05-07-2024

Hey @gracelace

It's rare that Google noindexes the primary page for this reason. Please show me an example where a primary page was determined as the alternative and the incorrect URL was used as the canonical.

I wrote about the alternate page report more in detail which may help to clear up some confusion and it shows you how to actually check to see what Google is doing.

https://www.ilanadavis.com/blogs/articles/alternate-page-with-proper-canonical-tag-explained-for-sho...

The Alternate page with proper canonical tag will have ZERO impact on rankings. Please show me the article where it states otherwise. If you're referring to too many redirects, that's a different issue entirely.

I believe you're talking about the report "Page with redirect"? This is just a report to show you which page Google found that is no longer available and links to another. Anytime you delete or archive a page from your website, you should create a redirect.

A redirect tells Google to ignore the original URL and use the new one instead. As time goes on, Google will recognize the old URL is gone, remove it from indexing, and only index the new one. The old URL will eventually drop off the report.

There is nothing inherently wrong with redirects. The issue is when you have pageA redirecting to pageB which redirects to pageC which redirects to pageD. That's what SEOs mean when they say "too many redirects".

A better approach is to redirect pageA directly to pageD. To resolve that, you have to audit your redirects and remove the middle-man so to speak.

But that is not what the page with redirect report in GSC is reporting.

Hopefully that helps. I agree that it's difficult to get someone to take ownership of this confusion which is why I'm trying to help reassure you. Frankly, it doesn't matter who's "fault" it is. You will spend time trying to clear all these reports (which is impossible) and it will have zero impact on your SEO.

Ilana Davis, Shopify Superhero
JSON-LD for SEO, adds structured data to your theme, getting you more organic traffic with Rich Results.

Matt_Jackson · ‎11-08-2023

If you don't want to use the Shopify related product recommendations, then just remove the parameter from the related product section in the template, and it'll ensure Google only crawls the canonical version of your products.

Ecommerce SEO Expert, get up to date tips on my blog: https://matt-jackson.com

SEO Error Alternate Page With Proper Canonical Tag

SEO Error Alternate Page With Proper Canonical Tag

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