Google-selected canonical makes no sense

[DmitriiK]

Howdy, fellow mozzers,

We have added canonical URL to this page - https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/houston-tx/margot-schurig-8715369/share, pointing to https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/houston-tx/margot-schurig-8715369

When I check in Google search console, there are no issues reported with that page, and Google does say that it was able to properly read the canonical URL.

Yet, it still chooses the page itself as canonical. This doesn't make sense to me. (Here is the link to the screenshot: https://dmitrii-regexseo.tinytake.com/tt/MzU0Mjc0M18xMDY2MTc4Ng)

Has anyone dealt with this type of issue, and were you able to resolve it?

[DmitriiK]

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, that makes sense, and that was my recommendation to add noindexing. I'm just curious about how and why Google decided that our canonical is not worth it

[effectdigital]

Oh wow that's very insensitive of Google! What you have to understand is that, most online content exists to sell products, to drive revenue and business - to a large degree that's how Google evaluates web-pages (the lens that it sees through)

If you page were commercial in nature (which obviously it is not) then Google would be making a semi logical decision. They're trying to skip users past the 'waffle and blurb' to the 'action point' where the user performs their only meaningful interaction with the page (in this case, a contact form)

For your site this is entirely inappropriate. To be honest you could Meta no-index and / or robots.txt block the "/share" (contact form) URL - to discourage Google from crawling and indexing it. Robots.txt controls crawling (less relevant), Meta no-index controls indexation. Note that like the canonical tag, these are both still 'directives' which Google doesn't 'have' to obey (fundamentally). Don't deploy both at once, as if you deploy robots.txt first (thus stopping Google from crawling the URL) - Google won't be able to crawl and 'find' the Meta no-index directive

Remember: telling Google not to crawl one URL, doesn't necessarily mean that your preferred URL will rank in its place

Your other option is to re-code the site, so that the contact form pops out in a content-box (or slider). That way, the contact from will share the same URL as the main page - thus Google will have to rank them both simultaneously (as it will have no choice)

Sorry that you have encountered such a difficult issue, hope my advice helps somewhat