Canonical and Sitemap issue

[scarebearz]

Hi all,

I was told that I could change my homepage Canonical tag to match that of my XML sitemap, this sitemap is being generated for me automatically and shows the homepage as e.g. https://www.mysite.com/index.html, yet my Canonical tag has been set to https://www.mysite.com.

Google currently shows as https://www.mysite.com/ being indexed, but https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results.

Can someone please tell me if I should change the Canonical to the index.html version, or if I should do nothing, or remove the Canonical tag altogether?

Thank you for looking.

[DonnaDuncan]

I agree with the others. Given "https://www.mysite.com/index.html is not currently displayed in search results", in all likelihood it is being redirected to https://www.mysite.com (and should be). So you don't want to change the canonical to the index.html version of the page only to have it redirected back to https://www.mysite.com. It'll unnecessarily slow the site and might even create a loop.

[scarebearz]

Thank you both, I'll leave it as it is, I'm not able to edit the XML my side sadly.

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, that's a good point. Canonicals are suggestions for Google, not commands.

[Linda-Vassily]

I see your point, and don't worry about it. Sitemaps help Google find all of your pages and can provide certain other information, but they are not required so no need to overthink them. In general Google is pretty good at finding what it needs to find. And it will certainly find your homepage.

[Joe_Stoffel]

I agree with Linda here, I would leave the canonical tag as is. It is a cleaner, better looking URL for the SERPs. If anything, manually update the XML file to reflect the canonical version of the homepage. The main purpose of the XML sitemap is to help search engines crawl and index a website. The homepage is going to be the most frequently crawled page so Google will not have a problem finding it.

Also, do not worry about Google disliking the canonical pointing to .com instead of /index.html. If Google determines that is not the ideal URL for it's index it will ignore the canonical tag.

[scarebearz]

Hi,

Thanks, basically I was concerned that Google may not like that https://www.mysite.com/ was not in the sitemap, yet index.html was and the canonical was pointing to https://www.mysite.com.

If that makes any sense....

[Linda-Vassily]

What are you trying to achieve? Do you particularly want the index.html version to be the canonical? The https://www.mysite.com/ version is more straightforward and what most people would expect your homepage URL to be.

Unless there is some pressing reason to do otherwise, I'd leave it the way it is.