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High This Hint is very important, and definitely warrants attention. Issue This Hint represents an error or problem that needs to be fixed.

AMP Page URL has canonical URL which is not indexable

This means that the URL in question is an AMP Page URL, and contains a canonical tag pointing to a URL which is not indexable.

Why is this important?

AMP HTML documents are required to have a canonical to the non-AMP equivalent (or a self-reference, if no equivalent exists). If this canonical is pointing to a URL that is not indexable, search engines may not index the AMP URL.

The canonical tag is a mandatory element for AMP pages to be considered valid, and the canonical tag is supposed to point back at the original 'non-AMP' version of the page. If this page is not indexable, this sends a conflicting signal to search engines - increasing the chances that the AMP page will not show up in search results.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any AMP Page URL which has a canonical tag pointing to a URL that is has an indexable status of 'Not Indexable.'

Examples that trigger this Hint

Consider the AMP Page URL: https://example.com/amp/page-a/

The Hint would trigger for this URL if it included a canonical URL,

<!doctype html>
<html amp>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Sample document</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pages/page-a/" />
...
</head>
...
</html>

where this canonical URL is not indexable. A URL can be not indexable for a variety of reasons:

  • The URL is set to noindex
  • The URL is canonicalized
  • The URL is disallowed in robots.txt
  • The URL does not return a 200 status
  • Sitebulb was unable to crawl the URL properly

How do you resolve this issue?

The canonical on an AMP page should be pointing to a URL that is indexable.

To rectify the issue, you would need to fix the canonical on the AMP page so that it points back to the (correct) non-AMP version of the page, and ensure that this page is indexable.

You would also need to ensure that the non-AMP version of the page has a self-referencing canonical. It should look like this:

For the URL: https://example.com/pages/page-a/

This page defines a self-reference canonical and an AMP page:

<link rel="amphtml" href="https://example.com/amp/page-a/">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pages/page-a/" />

Then the AMP page has a canonical pointing back at https://example.com/pages/page-a/

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pages/page-a/" />

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