In practicality, a canonical tag specifies to search engines the version of a URL which should appear in search results.
How to Fix Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag Status?
Step 1: Check for correctly canonicalized pages
Go to Coverage > Alternate page with proper canonical tag and check the pages listed there and whether or not these pages must be canonicalized. If these pages do not need to be canonicalized, then update the canonical link to point to itself.
Step 2: Check if the internal link structure needs assistance
If the pages are already properly canonicalized, then check their URL patterns. In all probability, one would find page variants, AMP pages, and URLs with UTM tags. Although these are fine normally but under certain circumstances, these could be a problem.
Page variant overload
It is troublesome if sites have multiple page variants. For instance, if an eCommerce site generates URLs for the same shirt in all sizes and colors, then there could be 25 URLs for each product. Since only a certain percentage of URLs receive organic traffic, it would be ideal to make some pages inaccessible to search engines. One way of doing so is by using a # in the URL.
Rogue UTM tags
Things could go wrong if somebody adds UTM tags to internal links in the sidebar, main navigation, body content, or footer. This should never be done as it dilutes the transfer of page authority. It even messes up Google Analytics data.
Step 3: Check for issues about the crawl budget
People can control how they link to their content but they cannot control how others link to them. While browsing the pages with the status Alternate page with proper canonical tag, one should take note of unknown URLs. If a website has only a few thousand pages but there are hundreds and thousands of pages with the status Alternate page with proper canonical tagthen one should consider using a robots.txt file to stop search engines from crawling such URLs. Doing this saves the crawl budget. It is advisable to ponder upon crawl budget issues if a website has 10,000 pages or more.
How to Apply a Canonical Tag?
For the pages that Google should recognize as canonical, the website owner should add a link tag to the head of the HTML code. For instance, to designate http://www.xyz.com with the canonical tag, the code shall look like: This can be done for all the pages that should have a canonical tag. To streamline this effort, one can also use a Content Management System like WordPress. Hope the information on how to fix alternate page with proper canonical tag helps to resolve the issue.
