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So, to cut a long story short, on our website we have a /product page that is very similar to our homepage and doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It doesn't really fit in with the rest of the website and our directors want to get rid of it and focus our efforts on our homepage.

Problem is, the /product page has a little bit of PA and links to other important pages on the website. I personally don't want to completely cut this page off. Would a 301 redirect to the homepage be a good option or would I be better off redirecting users to our course library page (Our course pages are what bring in most of our organic traffic)?

Any help or other suggestions would be appreciated here!

http://www.ihasco.co.uk/

For a long time, we were ranking 1st/2nd for the term "Manual handling training". That was until about 5 days ago when I realised that Google had started to index not only a query stringed URL, but also an old version of the URL.

What was even weirder was that when you clicked on the result it 301 redirected to the page that it was meant to display...

The wrong URL that Google had started to index was: www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling?channel=retail

The correct URL that it should have been indexing is: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/manual-handling-training

I can't get my head around why it has done this as a 301 was in place already and we use rel canonical tags which point to the main parent pages.

Anyway, we slapped a noindex tag in our robots.txt file to stop that page from being indexed, which worked but now I can't get the correct page to be indexed, even after a Google fetch.

After inspecting the correct URL in the new search console I discovered that Google has ignored the rel canonical on the page (Which points to itself) and has selected the wrong, query stringed URL as the canonical. Why? and how do I rectify this?

Many thanks, Donald - hugely appreciated!

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

That's an interesting point but why would this problem only affect this URL?

We have over 80 pages (courses) which use the same template. These pages are dynamic, so if one page is experiencing problems in Google (such as pulling an old URL) why aren't the other 79 pages doing the same?

Also, I understand that the trailing slash could be seen as a duplicate page in Google, however, this doesn’t explain why it’s pulling an old (now redirected) URL of that page? We don’t use that old URL anywhere on our site, no even in the sitemap.

Many thanks,

Thanks Nigel,

This is being actioned

Hugely appreciate your time.