Google Only Indexing Canonical Root URL Instead of Specified URL Parameters
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We just launched a website about 1 month ago and noticed that Google was indexing, but not displaying, URLs with "?location=" parameters such as: http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=great-falls-virginia and http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=mclean-virginia.
Instead, Google has only been displaying our root URL http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/ in its search results -- which we don't want as the URLs with specific locations are more important and each has its own unique list of houses for sale.
We have Yoast setup with all of these ?location values added in our sitemap that has successfully been submitted to Google's Sitemaps: http://www.castlemap.com/buy-location-sitemap.xml
I also tried going into the old Google Search Console and setting the "location" URL Parameter to Crawl Every URL with the Specifies Effect enabled... and I even see the two URLs I mentioned above in Google's list of Parameter Samples... but the pages are still not being added to Google.
Even after Requesting Indexing again after making all of these changes a few days ago, these URLs are still displaying as Allowing Indexing, but Not On Google in the Search Console and not showing up on Google when I manually search for the entire URL.
Why are these pages not showing up on Google and how can we get them to display? Only solution I can think of would be to set our main /local-house-values/ page to noindex in order to have Google favor all of our other URL parameter versions... but I'm guessing that's probably not a good solution for multiple reasons.
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You're right, didn't notice that this was being added by Yoast. Removing that fixed everything.
Thanks, Gaston!
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Hi Nutric,
Google is not doing anything wrong. You have the canonical tag present in those pages and point to the page without parameters.
Check the images im attaching.What you should do is to disallow the canonical in for that parameters or create the subfolder for these locations.
Best luck.
GR.
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