IndexerNow

Canonical & meta finder

Paste a page's HTML and we'll pull out the tags that decide how it gets indexed — canonical, robots, title, description, hreflang, Open Graph, and structured-data types.

View-source on any page, paste the markup here. Everything runs in your browser — no URL is fetched.

Canonical URL
Meta robots
<title>
Meta description
og:title
og:image
Twitter card
Structured data types

Quick checks

  • Has a canonicalMissing — Google will choose one for you.
  • Single canonicalOK
  • IndexableNo robots meta — defaults to index, follow.
  • Has <title>Missing
  • Has meta descriptionMissing
  • Has og:imageMissing — shares fall back to a default preview.
  • Has structured dataNo JSON-LD found.

Common canonical issues (and how to fix each)

Canonical points at another URL

The page tells Google "index that other page instead of me." Fine when intentional (a syndicated copy), a silent traffic killer when a template accidentally canonicalizes every page to the homepage.

Canonical points at a redirect or 404

Google follows the canonical and finds a hop or a dead end, so it distrusts the signal and picks its own canonical. Point the tag at the final, 200-status URL.

Multiple or conflicting canonical tags

Two <link rel="canonical"> tags — often one from the CMS and one from an SEO plugin — usually mean Google ignores both. Keep exactly one.

Missing self-referencing canonical

Not fatal, but without a self-reference every tracking-parameter variant of the URL competes as a separate page. A self-canonical consolidates them.

http/www variants without a canonical

If http://, https://, www and non-www all resolve without one canonical (plus redirects), Google splits signals across four duplicates and chooses its own winner.

Canonical contradicted by other signals

The tag says one URL while the sitemap, internal links, and hreflang all say another. Google treats the canonical as a hint, not a directive — when signals disagree it often overrides you (that's the 'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical' status).

Seeing duplicate-canonical statuses in Search Console? Follow the step-by-step fix for Duplicate without user-selected canonical, and see the canonical URL glossary entry for how Google weighs the signal.

FAQ

What is a canonical issue?
A canonical issue is any situation where the rel="canonical" tag sends Google a wrong or mixed signal about which URL is the primary version of a page — pointing at the wrong URL, at a redirect or 404, appearing twice with different values, or contradicting the sitemap and internal links. The result is Google indexing the wrong URL, splitting ranking signals across duplicates, or dropping the page entirely.
How do I find canonical issues on my site?
Page by page: paste the HTML into this checker and it extracts the canonical plus every related signal (meta robots, hreflang, Open Graph, JSON-LD). Site-wide: Google Search Console's Pages report lists affected URLs under statuses like 'Duplicate without user-selected canonical' and 'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical'.
How do I fix 'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical'?
Google found near-identical pages and picked a different canonical than the one you declared. Make the real signals agree with your tag: consolidate genuinely duplicate content, make internal links and the sitemap point at your preferred URL, and keep one self-referencing canonical on it. We have a dedicated step-by-step fix guide for this status.
Does a wrong canonical stop a page from being indexed?
It can. A canonical pointing elsewhere tells Google to index the other URL instead — so the page itself is effectively removed from consideration. It's one of the signals worth checking whenever a page won't index; run the URL through the indexability checker to see every blocker at once.

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