Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical

[Eric_S]

Hi all,

A number of our pages have dropped out of search rankings.

It seems they are being marked as "Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical"

However, the page Google is choosing as the canonical is totally different - different headings, titles, metadata, content on the page.

We are completely mystified as to why this is happening. If anyone can shed any light, it would be hugely appreciated!

Example URL is this one:
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/london

Which Google seems to think is a duplicate of this: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/solicitor/london

[seoelevated]

Hi Eric. I took a look at your two pages. When I look at the page source (not with "inspect", but with "view page source"), I see that all of the content on your page is injected via javascript. There is almost no html for the page. To me, this looks like for whatever reason, Google isn't able to execute and parse the content being injected by javascript, and so when it crawls just the html, it is seeing the two pages as duplicate because the body of the content (in html page source) is mostly identical.

That does raise a question of why Google isn't able to parse the content of the scripts. Historically, Google just didn't execute the scripts. Now it does, but they acknowledge that content injected by scripts may not always ben indexed. As well, if scripts take too long to execute for the bot, then again, the content may not be indexed.

My recommendation would be to find some ways to have some unique html per page (not just the script content).

[RossKernez]

Hi Eric,

You can try to add unique content to each page and request reindexing via GSC.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Eric,

This could be a different problem than just your canonical URL pointing to be something different, which is different from your HEAD canonical tag on these pages. What type of keywords are you checking this against, because that actually drives more input into what Google is seeing as a better version?

Martijn.