Some canonical tags may exist on a page, but point to the wrong URL.
If you’re facing this issue, here’s how to resolve it.
If a canonical tag points to a different page than you wanted, Google may be confused about which page is intended for ranking in the search engine results.
An incorrect canonical will need to be deleted and added again so it points to the correct page.
The URL needs to be a valid, working URL — and the one that you intended to canonicalize the page.
You can delete extra canonical tags at scale with just a few steps with an execution-first SEO platform.
Here’s how to do it in 3 steps with seoClarity’s ClarityAutomate — no dev team required.
In this example, we’re interested in deleting canonicals, so you simply select “Canonical Tag” in ClarityAutomate.
In order to fix this problem, we need to first delete the incorrect canonical, so we select “Delete”.
This is where you set the XPath of the <link rel="canonical"> on the page that you need to remove.
Another 3-step process will automatically add the correct canonical tag to the page.
This follows the same process as step #1 above — since we’re adding in a canonical tag, all you have to do is select “Canonical Tag” in ClarityAutomate.
In this case, we want to add a new canonical tag to the page that will replace the one that we just deleted.
Enter the hyperlink of the new canonical URL.