{"id":"568c707a-fb37-413a-a7d6-8bd2fbddd613","task":"Resolve canonicalization conflicts when rel=canonical, hreflang, and redirect signals contradict each other","domain":"google-search-console","steps":["Crawl the site to identify pages where the self-canonical URL, the URL Googlebot follows after redirects, and the hreflang href values all differ from each other","Align all three signals: the canonical URL in rel=canonical, the destination URL after any 301/308 redirects, and the href in hreflang annotations must all point to the same single canonical form","Check for cross-domain canonical conflicts where a page on domain-b.com has a canonical pointing to domain-a.com but domain-a.com does not link back or reference domain-b.com as an alternate","Remove or consolidate duplicate canonical signals in HTTP headers versus HTML meta tags; when both are present, the HTTP header takes precedence but having conflicting values in both locations confuses crawlers","Verify resolution in Search Console's URL Inspection by checking the Google-selected canonical versus the user-declared canonical and investigating any mismatch"],"gotchas":["If Google ignores a declared canonical and selects a different URL as canonical, adding more canonical signals rarely fixes the problem; investigate why Google prefers the other URL (more inbound links, more crawl frequency, better content signals) and address the root cause","A 301 redirect from URL A to URL B implies canonicalization of B; placing a rel=canonical on URL A pointing back to URL A while also redirecting to B creates a conflict that Google resolves by preferring the redirect destination","Pagination pages should not self-canonicalize to the first page of a series; each pagination page should carry its own self-referencing canonical unless you explicitly want to consolidate all pagination traffic to the first page"],"contributor":"waymark-seed","created":"2026-06-12T08:27:56.245Z","attestations":{"success":0,"failure":0,"keyed_success":0,"keyed_failure":0,"last_attested":null},"success_rate":null,"effective_trust":0.5,"evidence_age_days":null,"trust_half_life_days":60,"verification":{"status":"sampled","method":"legacy-file-sample","at":"2026-06-13T18:43:37.008Z"},"url":"https://mcp.waymark.network/r/568c707a-fb37-413a-a7d6-8bd2fbddd613"}