{"id":18528,"date":"2022-12-14T11:15:52","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T11:15:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/?post_type=ht_kb&#038;p=18528"},"modified":"2022-12-22T10:39:15","modified_gmt":"2022-12-22T10:39:15","slug":"how-to-fix-alternate-page-with-proper-canonical-tag-page-index-issue-in-google-search-console","status":"publish","type":"ht_kb","link":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/article\/how-to-fix-alternate-page-with-proper-canonical-tag-page-index-issue-in-google-search-console\/","title":{"rendered":"How to fix &#8220;Alternate page with proper canonical tag&#8221; Page Index issue in Google Search Console"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"640\" src=\"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-1024x640.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-18532\" srcset=\"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-1024x640.png 1024w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-300x188.png 300w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-768x480.png 768w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-50x31.png 50w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-1536x960.png 1536w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-2048x1280.png 2048w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-60x38.png 60w, https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Pageindexing2022-09-0114-42-47-100x63.png 100w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2><strong>The following reasons can be shown for non-indexing.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h4>Server error (5xx)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Your server returned a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/list_of_http_status_codes\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">500-level error<\/a>&nbsp;when the page was requested. See&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/7440203#fixing_server_errors\"><em>Fixing server errors<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Redirect error<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>Google experienced one of the following redirect errors:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>A redirect chain that was too long<\/li><li>A redirect loop<\/li><li>A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the max URL length<\/li><li>A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Use a web debugging tool such as&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/web\/tools\/lighthouse#devtools\">Lighthouse<\/a>&nbsp;to get more details about the redirect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>URL blocked by robots.txt<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page was&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062608\">blocked by your site&#8217;s robots.txt file<\/a>. You can verify this using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/webmasters\/tools\/robots-testing-tool\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">robots.txt tester<\/a>.&nbsp;<strong>Note that this does not guarantee that the page won&#8217;t be indexed through some other means.<\/strong>&nbsp;If Google can find other information about this page without loading it, there is a very small chance that the page might still be indexed. To ensure that a page is not indexed by Google, remove the robots.txt block and use a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/93710\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&#8216;noindex&#8217; directive<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>URL marked \u2018noindex\u2019<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>When Google tried to index the page it encountered a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/93710\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">&#8216;noindex&#8217; directive<\/a>&nbsp;and therefore did not index it. If you do not want this page indexed, congratulations! If you&nbsp;<em>do<\/em>&nbsp;want this page to be indexed, you should remove the &#8216;noindex&#8217; directive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>To confirm the problem:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol><li>Click the inspection icon&nbsp;<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.gstatic.com\/images\/icons\/material\/system\/1x\/search_grey600_18dp.png\">&nbsp;next to the URL in the table.<\/li><li>Under&nbsp;<strong>Coverage &gt; Indexing &gt; Indexing allowed?<\/strong>&nbsp;the report should show that noindex is preventing indexing. You can&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=view+page+source+in+browser\">search the page source<\/a>&nbsp;or&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/developer.chrome.com\/docs\/devtools\/network\/reference\/#headers\">response headers<\/a>&nbsp;for the word &#8220;noindex&#8221;.<\/li><li>Confirm that the noindex tag still exists in the live version:<ol><li>Clicking&nbsp;<strong>Test live URL<\/strong><\/li><li>Under&nbsp;<strong>Availability &gt; Indexing &gt; Indexing allowed?<\/strong>&nbsp;see if the noindex directive is still detected. If noindex is no longer present, you can click&nbsp;<strong>Request Indexing<\/strong>&nbsp;to ask Google to try again to index the page. If noindex is still present, you must remove it in order for the page to be indexed.<\/li><\/ol><\/li><li>If you want this page to be indexed, you must remove the tag or HTTP header.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n<h4>Soft 404<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page request returns what we think is a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/181708\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">soft 404 response<\/a>. This means that it returns a user-friendly &#8220;not found&#8221; message but not a 404 HTTP response code. We recommend returning a 404 response code for truly &#8220;not found&#8221; pages and adding more information on the page to let us know that it is not a soft 404. To see how Google sees the page,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/9012289#test_live_page\">run a live URL inspection test<\/a>&nbsp;against the page and click&nbsp;<strong>View tested page<\/strong>&nbsp;to see a screenshot showing how Google renders the page.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/181708\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Learn how to fix a soft 404<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Blocked due to unauthorized request (401)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page was blocked to Googlebot by a request for authorization (<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/list_of_http_status_codes#4xx_client_errors\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">401 response<\/a>). If you do want Googlebot to be able to index this page, either remove authorization requirements for this page, or else&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/80553\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">allow Googlebot to access your pages by verifying its identity<\/a>. You can verify this error by&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/chrome\/answer\/95464\">visiting the page in incognito mode<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Not found (404)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page returned a 404 error when requested. Google discovered this URL without any explicit request or sitemap. Google might have discovered the URL as a link from another page, or possibly the page existed before and was deleted. Googlebot will probably continue to try this URL for some period of time; there is no way to tell Googlebot to permanently forget a URL, although it will crawl it less and less often. 404 responses are not necessarily a problem, if the page has been removed without any replacement. If your page has moved, use a 301 redirect to the new location. See&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/7440203#fixing_404_errors\"><em>Fixing 404 errors<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Blocked due to access forbidden (403)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>HTTP 403 means that the user agent provided credentials, but was not granted access. However, Googlebot never provides credentials, so your server is returning this error incorrectly. The page will not be indexed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you do want Googlebot to index this page, you should either admitting non-signed-in users or explicitly allow Googlebot requests without authentication (though you should&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/80553\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">verify its identity<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>URL blocked due to other 4xx issue<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The server encountered a 4xx error not covered by any other issue type described here. Try debugging your page using the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/9012289\">URL Inspection tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Blocked by page removal tool<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page is currently blocked by a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/1663419\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">URL removal request<\/a>, either by someone who manages this property in Search Console or by an approved request from a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/websearch\/troubleshooter\/3111061\">site visitor<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Use the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/1663419\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">URL removals tool<\/a>&nbsp;to see who submitted a URL removal request. Removal requests are only good for about 90 days after the removal date. After that period, Googlebot may go back and index the page even if you do not submit another index request.&nbsp;<strong>If you don&#8217;t want the page indexed<\/strong>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/93710\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">use &#8216;noindex&#8217;<\/a>, require authorization for the page, or remove the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4><a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/7643010\">Crawled<\/a>&nbsp;&#8211; currently not indexed<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page was crawled by Google but not indexed. It may or may not be indexed in the future; no need to resubmit this URL for crawling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Discovered &#8211; currently not indexed<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Typically, Google wanted to crawl the URL but this was expected to overload the site; therefore Google rescheduled the crawl. This is why the last crawl date is empty on the report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Alternate page with proper canonical tag<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page is marked as an&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/12642438\">alternate<\/a>&nbsp;of another page (that is, an AMP page with a desktop canonical, or a mobile version of a desktop&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/139066\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">canonical<\/a>, or the desktop version of a mobile canonical). This page correctly points to the canonical page, which is indexed, so there is nothing you need to do. Alternate language pages are not detected by Search Console.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Duplicate without user-selected canonical<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page is a duplicate of another page, although it doesn&#8217;t&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/search\/docs\/crawling-indexing\/consolidate-duplicate-urls#define-canonical\">indicate a preferred canonical page<\/a>. Google has chosen the other page as the canonical for this page, and so will not serve this page in Search. You can&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/9012289\">Inspect this URL<\/a>&nbsp;to see which URL Google considers canonical for this page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is not an error, but is working as intended, because Google does not serve&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/12642436\">duplicate pages<\/a>. However, if you think that Google has chosen the wrong URL as canonical, you can&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/139066\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">explicitly mark the canonical for this page<\/a>. Alternately, if you think that this page is not a duplicate of the Google-chosen canonical, you should ensure that the content differs substantially between the two pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page is marked as canonical for a set of pages, but Google thinks another URL makes a better canonical. Google has indexed the page that we consider canonical rather than this one.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/9012289\">Inspect this URL<\/a>&nbsp;to see the Google-selected canonical URL. If you think this page is not a duplicate of the Google-chosen canonical, you should ensure that the content between the pages differs substantively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4>Page with redirect<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The URL redirects to another URL and therefore was not indexed. The final target URL might be indexed, and should appear in this report. If you test this URL in the URL Inspection report, the indexed test will show the redirect; the live test will follow and test the redirected page, though it won&#8217;t show the URL of the redirected and tested page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h3>Warning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Warnings are listed in the&nbsp;<em>Improve page experience<\/em>&nbsp;table on the summary page of the Page indexing report. These issues don&#8217;t prevent a page from being indexed, but they do reduce Google&#8217;s ability to understand and index your pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4><a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/7643505\">Indexed<\/a>, though blocked by robots.txt<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>The page was indexed despite being blocked by your website&#8217;s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062608\">robots.txt file<\/a>. Google always respects robots.txt, but this doesn&#8217;t necessarily prevent indexing&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062608#robotted-but-indexed\">if someone else links to your page<\/a>. Google won&#8217;t request and crawl the page, but we can still index it, using the information from the page that links to your blocked page. Because of the robots.txt rule, any snippet shown in Google Search results for the page will probably be very limited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Next steps:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li><strong>If you&nbsp;<em>do<\/em>&nbsp;want to block this page from Google Search,<\/strong>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062608\">robots.txt is not the correct mechanism to avoid being indexed<em>.<\/em><\/a>&nbsp;To avoid being indexed,&nbsp;<strong>remove<\/strong>&nbsp;the robots.txt block&nbsp;<strong>and<\/strong>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/93710\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">use &#8216;noindex&#8217;<\/a>.<\/li><li><strong>If you&nbsp;<em>do not<\/em>&nbsp;want to block this page,<\/strong>&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062598\">update your robots.txt file to unblock your page<\/a>. You can use the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/webmasters\/tools\/robots-testing-tool\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">robots.txt tester<\/a>&nbsp;to determine which rule is blocking this page.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h4>Page indexed without content<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>This page appears in the Google index, but for some reason Google could not read the content. Possible reasons are that the page might be&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/66355\">cloaked to Google<\/a>&nbsp;or the page might be in a format that Google can&#8217;t index. This is&nbsp;<strong>not<\/strong>&nbsp;a case of robots.txt blocking.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/9012289\">Inspect the page<\/a>, and look at the&nbsp;<strong>Coverage<\/strong>&nbsp;section for details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>It&#8217;s totally dependent on Google regarding indexing, and we can&#8217;t do anything.<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"div-1\" class=\"hkb-feedback\">\n\t\t\t<strong class=\"ht-mobile-exit__title\">Ask your Questions Directly!<\/strong><br>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"hkb_widget_exit__content\" style=\"font-size: 14px;\">If you can't find the solutions in this article, then just ask us in the comments and we will answer it for you!<\/div>\n\t\t\t<a href=\"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/support\/#contact\" id=\"button\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><button>Yes, I have a Question<\/button><\/a>\n\t\t<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following reasons can be shown for non-indexing. Server error (5xx) Your server returned a&nbsp;500-level error&nbsp;when the page was requested. See&nbsp;Fixing server errors. Redirect error Google experienced one of the following redirect errors: A redirect chain that was too long A redirect loop A redirect URL that eventually exceeded the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"ht-kb-category":[],"ht-kb-tag":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb\/18528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ht_kb"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18528"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb\/18528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18538,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb\/18528\/revisions\/18538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"ht_kb_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb-category?post=18528"},{"taxonomy":"ht_kb_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/tutorials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ht-kb-tag?post=18528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}