indiaseobriefs

A canonical tag is one line of HTML and it decides which of your URLs Google treats as the real one. Get it wrong and you can take a page that ranks and make it invisible, without breaking anything a visitor would notice. No error, no 404, no drop in traffic you can trace to a deploy — just a page that stops appearing.

I have found all five of the following on live Indian websites this year. They are not exotic. Three of them were on sites that had been paying for SEO for over a year.

1. The canonical points at the old URL after a migration

This is the most expensive one. A site moves from /service-page.html to /service-page/, the redirects are set up correctly, and the canonical tag in the new page's head still says .html. The redirect tells Google to go to the new URL; the canonical on the new URL tells Google the real page is the old one. The two instructions conflict and the page's ranking signals end up in limbo.

It is invisible in every normal check. The page loads, the redirect works, the content is right. You only see it by viewing source on the live page and reading the canonical, which is a step almost nobody does after a migration sign-off.

2. Every page canonicalised to the homepage

Usually a template or plugin misconfiguration. Someone sets the canonical in a shared header and hardcodes the site root. The result is that every page on the site tells Google “I am actually the homepage”, and the site collapses to one indexed URL. This one is dramatic enough that it gets caught — but typically weeks later, after someone asks why forty pages disappeared from Search Console.

3. Self-canonical on paginated and filtered URLs

Category page two canonicalising to itself, filter combinations canonicalising to themselves, sort orders canonicalising to themselves. The index fills with near-duplicates, crawl budget drains into permutations, and the page you wanted to rank competes with forty variants of itself. On Indian ecommerce sites with faceted navigation this is routinely the largest single indexing problem, and it is usually invisible until someone counts indexed URLs against actual pages.

4. Canonical in the body instead of the head

A canonical tag placed below the opening <body> tag — often by a tag manager or an injected script — is ignored entirely. The page behaves as if it has no canonical at all. Everything looks correct in the source if you search for the string; it is only wrong because of where it sits. Check the position, not just the presence.

5. Mixed protocol and host variants

http:// canonicalising to https://, or www to non-www, inconsistently across the site. Some pages point one way, some the other, often because the site was built across two eras. Google resolves it eventually, badly, and the consolidation of link signals that a canonical exists to achieve never happens.

How to check in ten minutes

Pull your sitemap. Fetch every URL in it. Extract the canonical from each and compare it to the URL you fetched. Any row where they differ is either a deliberate decision you should be able to explain in one sentence, or a bug.

That is it. It is a short script or a crawler run, it takes minutes, and on most Indian sites that have been through a redesign it finds something. On one site earlier this year it found eleven pages canonicalising to URLs that had been retired two years earlier — which is exactly the kind of fault that makes a site feel stuck for reasons nobody can name.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Canonicals are not a ranking factor you optimise. They are plumbing. When plumbing is wrong, every other investment leaks: the links you built point at a page Google has been told is not canonical, the content you wrote sits on a URL that is not the one being indexed, and the audit that found neither looked at rankings rather than at source.

This is the first thing Deep Bhardwaj checks on any Indian site that has been through a redesign or a replatform, because it is quick, it is binary, and it is the fault most likely to be silently undoing everything else.

Related: sitemap hygiene and the 404 trap is the companion check — a sitemap full of URLs that redirect or 404 undermines the same consolidation, and the two faults usually travel together.