Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical, HOW TO FIX?

For SEO, content duplication is one of the major problems many websites come across, and still, there is no indication of why this is happening even though everything seems okay.

Suppose you are unaware of the issue and are on this article. It seems you have not submitted your URL on Google Webmaster Tools, which Digital Marketing Agencies and Website Design Companies use to fix your website errors on Google Search Engines.

We advise every website owner to know How TO SUBMIT URL IN GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINES because this will help you see if your SEO Agencies are doing an excellent job. 

If you search Google accordingly, it will say that somehow and somewhere, there is some duplication of URLs.

Well, this is right, but there can be things that you have not yet imagined. We are running a massive website with lots of complexities and functions that have been causing similar issues you must be facing, but our website is more complex with lots of pages, and again we have put a team to figure out what has been wrong in our SEO.

Although our Search Engine Optimization team has 5-10 years of experience, they also couldn't have figured out what had been the problem, But now we have griped the real issue, and we are in the position to solve it. 

We will go through straightforward steps so that you might be able to clean your website immediately.

Robots.txt (if you want to know more about robots.txt, click here)

Try keeping it clean  One of the reasons for keeping it clean is that it states a mark on your search console, which annoys me. This is our opinion to keep it clean; otherwise, anything that is blocked by robots.txt will show something like this.

However, Google says this will not affect your SEO ranking or anything, But we saw that if we manage to fix this, your ranking does improve vastly, So this article will help you resolve this issue.

Try keeping only your website files on a particular directory and any other directory to make a subdomain.

Duplicate URL by Google 

Duplicate content is content that has the same content on other pages. Duplicate content is tricky, but when search engines recently crawled many URLs with similar content, Google said it does not matter. Mueller of Google said

"if you had the same content in textual form on your website where it’s clearly duplicate content then what would happen there is we would pick one of those versions to show in Google Search.
It’s not the case that we would say: “oh this website has some duplicate content, we will not show it at all in Google.”

Rather we will say: “There are two versions here. We will pick one of these to show and we will just not show the other one.”

Why is this, so that duplicate content isn't affecting your ranking? Because many retailers use the same content, images, and description on their websites. Secondly, if you have duplicate content, this means that Google will ignore that page from crawling resulting in a waste of content that is unique on that page. 

Finally, even if your content is going on a good ranking, search engines may pick the wrong URL as the "original" using canonicalisation that helps you control your duplicate content.

The problem with URLs

You might be thinking, "Why would anyone duplicate a page?" and wrongly assuming that canonicalisation isn't something you have to worry about is a wrong concept. Humans think of a page as identical, but bots do not believe the same.

In search engine crawling, every unique URL is a separate page.

For example, search crawlers might be able to reach your homepage in all of the following ways:

• http://www.kabeeroptics.com
• https://www.kabeeroptics.com
• http://kabeeroptics.com
• http://kabeeroptics.com/index.php
• http://kabeeroptics.com/index.php?r...

This can only be resolved using 301 redirections to the one you have set on the search console, for example, https://webnet.com.pk. All your URLs should be redirected to the one you have placed on the search console.

This is a problem that causes a lot of indexing issues, and a lot of companies require developers to do it. This is why SEO requires a team, and it is not a one-person (freelancer doing SEO) job.

The other way of doing this is by using Canonicalization tags are required for all your pages. Of course, it is time-consuming, but it could be managed if you have fewer pages. However, if your pages are a lot, it should be resolved using 301 redirections.

If you have 301 redirections in place, we still face the same: duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical.

Now the problem is that once all this is resolved, Google somehow manages to give us the exact error. Initially, the number of pages is usually less, but once it keeps on crawling, the number of pages increases. Are you still facing the same problem?

NO  WOW, you have RESOLVED it, But to understand, to avoid the problem faced by others after fixing everything, please, I recommend reading this blog.

If your answer is YES, Your problem solution is just 1 min away. 

The tricky part in putting a canonical tag is to put the URL presently you want google to crawl. Many people don't know this, but this is very important; we will repeat it. The canonical URL is the present URL address you want google to crawl or is on the sitemap. Please allow Google some time depending on when google bots will crawl; it will eventually resolve it immediately. If you see google crawling your URL and your problem is still not fixed, please ensure you have the same URL on the sitemap.

Fixing Your Sitemap is very important, and it should be perfect. I hope you will have no problems now and if you do you could request us for some help.

Contact us now