Are you getting this indexing issue in your Google Search Console “Duplicate, Google chose a different canonical than user”
What is Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user?
In Google, Canonical Tags are used to inform Google which pages you want to appear in search results for a particular query.
If you are seeing “Duplicate, Google Chose Different canonical that user” is your Google Search Console indexing section. It means that you have duplicate content on your website. So, Google Chose the other content to appear in search results, not the one which you requested.
Note: Having Unique Titles for each page is of utmost importance. If you have unique titles for each page, then you won’t get this error in your Google Search Console indexing report.
If you are seeing this error in GSC, then in some cases your content might not be indexed at all.
Let me explain to you with an example,
Suppose, I have two URLs related to the same topic, in our case
1. farhanbajrai.com/tag/facebook-ads
2. farhanbajrai.com/category/facebook-ads
I am getting “Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” this error in my GSC for the first URL i.e., of “tags”.
When I inspected the first URL in my Google Search Console I got this result
The results clearly mention that “Page is not indexed: Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user” and if you read the complete result at the end it has both the URLs,
One is user declared, and the other one is Google-selected Canonical.
How to Find “Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical than User” Error
As discussed above, the easiest way to find the other canonical page which Google Chose, is to inspect the URL in Google Search Console, and it will display the details.
How to fix this Indexing problem?
The best way for fixing this problem is you should have different Titles as well as Slug for every page on your website.
In the above case, The Category as well as Tag is having same slug i.e., “Facebook Ads”. So Google chose the Categroy’s slug instead of the tag’s slug as canonical.
So, by changing the tag name you can easily solve this problem.
Suggested Readings:
