Playbook
    seo
    medium

    Fix a broken canonical tag

    Your canonical tag points to the wrong URL — or to a 404. Here is how to find the right canonical and stop losing rankings.

    15 minutesLast reviewed 2026-06-09

    What is happening

    The <link rel="canonical"> tag tells Google which URL is the "real" version of a page. If it points somewhere wrong, Google merges ranking signals into the wrong URL — or drops the page entirely.

    Fix it

  1. Open the page source (view-source: in any browser) and find the <link rel="canonical" href="..."> line.
  2. Visit the canonical URL in a new tab. If it 404s, redirects, or shows different content, the canonical is broken.
  3. Set the correct canonical. For most pages, the canonical should be a self-reference: the page's own clean URL (no query strings, no trailing slash variants, no UTM params).

    4. Canonical rules of thumb

  4. Use absolute URLs only. href="/page" is allowed but unreliable across CMSes — use href="https://yourdomain.com/page".
  5. One canonical per page. Multiple canonical tags are ignored entirely by Google.
  6. Canonical must return HTTP 200. If the canonical 404s or redirects, Google falls back to its own guess.
  7. Cross-domain canonicals are allowed but only use them when one site is genuinely a syndication of the other.

    8. Common gotchas

  8. CMS template uses the wrong URL. Yoast, Rank Math, and similar plugins sometimes set the canonical to the homepage by default. Override per-page.
  9. Pagination breaks canonical. Page 2 of a blog index should canonical to itself, not to page 1.
  10. HTTPS migration left HTTP canonicals. Search the codebase for canonical" href="http:// and replace.

    11. What this doesn't do

    This is for the broken-canonical case. For duplicate content across multiple URLs, see canonical vs 301 redirect.

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