<\/p>
Google\u2019s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why Google picks one web page over another when multiple pages have duplicate content, also explaining why Google sometimes appears to pick the wrong URL as the canonical.<\/p>
The word canonical was previously mostly used in the religious sense to describe what writings or beliefs were recognized to be authoritative. In the SEO community, the word is used to refer to which URL is the true web page when multiple web pages share the same or similar content.<\/p>
Google enables site owners and SEOs to provide a hint of which URL is the canonical with the use of an HTML attribute called rel=canonical. SEOs often refer to rel=canonical as an HTML element, but it\u2019s not. Rel=canonical is an attribute of the
A person on Reddit asked Mueller to provide a deeper dive on the reasons why Google picks one URL over another.<\/p>
They asked:<\/em><\/p> \u201cHey John, can I please ask you to go a little deeper on this? Let\u2019s say I want to understand why Google thinks two pages are duplicate and it chooses one over the other and the reason is not really in plain sight. What can one do to better understand why a page is chosen over another if they cover different topics? Like, IDK, red panda and \u201cregular\u201d panda \ud83d\udc3c. TY!!\u201d<\/p> Mueller answered with about nine different reasons why Google chooses one page over another, including the technical reasons why Google appears to get it wrong but in reality it\u2019s someetimes due to something that the site owner over SEO overlooked.<\/p> <\/blockquote> Here are the nine reasons he cited for canonical choices:<\/strong><\/p> Here\u2019s Mueller\u2019s complete answer:<\/em><\/p> \u201cThere is no tool that tells you why something was considered duplicate \u2013 over the years people often get a feel for it, but it\u2019s not always obvious. Matt\u2019s video \u201cHow does Google handle duplicate content?\u201d is a good starter, even now.<\/p> Some of the reasons why things are considered duplicate are (these have all been mentioned in various places \u2013 duplicate content about duplicate content if you will :-)): exact duplicate (everything is duplicate), partial match (a large part is duplicate, for example, when you have the same post on two blogs; sometimes there\u2019s also just not a lot of content to go on, for example if you have a giant menu and a tiny blog post), or \u2013 this is harder \u2013 when the URL looks like it would be duplicate based on the duplicates found elsewhere on the site (for example, if \/page?tmp=1234 and \/page?tmp=3458 are the same, probably \/page?tmp=9339 is too \u2014 this can be tricky & end up wrong with multiple parameters, is \/page?tmp=1234&city=detroit the same too? how about \/page?tmp=2123&city=chicago ?).<\/p> Two reasons I\u2019ve seen people get thrown off are: we use the mobile version (people generally check on desktop), and we use the version Googlebot sees (and if you show Googlebot a bot-challenge or some other pseudo-error-page, chances are we\u2019ve seen that before and might consider it a duplicate). Also, we use the rendered version \u2013 but this means we need to be able to render your page if it\u2019s using a JS framework for the content (if we can\u2019t render it, we might take the bootstrap HTML page and, chances are it\u2019ll be duplicate).<\/p> It happens that these systems aren\u2019t perfect in picking duplicate content, sometimes it\u2019s also just that the alternative URL feels obviously misplaced. Sometimes that settles down over time (as our systems recognize that things are really different), sometimes it doesn\u2019t.<\/p> If it\u2019s similar content then users can still find their way to it, so it\u2019s generally not that terrible. It\u2019s pretty rare that we end up escalating a wrong duplicate \u2013 over the years the teams have done a fantastic job with these systems; most of the weird ones are unproblematic, often it\u2019s just some weird error page that\u2019s hard to spot.\u201d<\/p> <\/blockquote> Mueller offered a deep dive into the reasons why Google chooses canonicals. He described the process of choosing canonicals as like a fuzzy sorting system built from overlapping signals, with Google comparing content, URL patterns, rendered output, and crawler-visible versions, while borderline classifications (\u201cweird ones\u201d) are given a pass because they don\u2019t pose a problem.<\/p> Featured Image by Shutterstock\/Garun .Prdt<\/em><\/p> <\/div> News,SEO#Google #Lists #Scenarios #Explain #Picks #Canonical #URLs #sejournal #martinibuster1776171393<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google\u2019s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why Google picks one web page over another when multiple pages have duplicate content, also explaining why Google sometimes appears to pick the wrong URL as the canonical. Canonical URLs The word canonical was previously mostly used in the religious sense to describe what writings or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[11000,4840,75,3317,415,3360,24167,80,22843],"class_list":["post-6471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accessibility","tag-canonical","tag-explain","tag-google","tag-lists","tag-martinibuster","tag-picks","tag-scenarios","tag-sejournal","tag-urls"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6471\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longzhuplatform.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
The pages are fully identical, leaving no meaningful signal to distinguish one URL from another.<\/li>
A large portion of the primary content overlaps across pages, such as the same article appearing in multiple places.<\/li>
The page\u2019s unique content is minimal, so repeated elements like navigation, menus, or layout dominate and make pages appear effectively the same.<\/li>
When multiple parameterized URLs are known to return the same content, Google may generalize that pattern and treat similar parameter variations as duplicates.<\/li>
Google may evaluate the mobile version instead of the desktop version, which can lead to duplication assessments that differ from what is manually checked.<\/li>
Canonical decisions are based on what Googlebot actually receives, not necessarily what users see.<\/li>
If Googlebot is shown bot challenges, pseudo-error pages, or other generic responses, those may match previously seen content and be treated as duplicates.<\/li>
When Google cannot render the page, it may rely on the base HTML shell, which can be identical across pages and trigger duplication.<\/li>
In some cases, a URL may be treated as duplicate simply because it appears \u201cmisplaced\u201d or due to limitations in how the system interprets similarity.<\/li> <\/ol>
Takeaway<\/h2>