Non-canonical pages listed in the sitemap - How to Fix?

On 4/22/2022 at 5:57 AM, Embdigit said:

I just updated my sitemap and the health score is now 98 which is a good sign for me. Thank you so much for the blog.

Hey @Embdigit!

I have a client with the same error in Ahrefs, and I see that you found a solution back in April. Any chance you might be willing to provide an update on how things have gone since then? I'm curious about how often you've needed to update the sitemap on Google Console, since making this change. 

Thanks in advance for the help, and hope you are having a wonderful day! 

Any update here? SOS!

Still waiting...........

Also looking to see if there is an update on this canonical issue with _/home appearing as the same as homepage. My SEO team is still saying the homepage of the site is appearing as duplicate content. Has anyone found any fixes to address this? Is there something we can do with Squarespace's URL remapping? 

Is there a solution to this yet?

Same issues here. Is there a way to upload a custom sitemap to my squarespace site and bypass all of this nonsense? 

On 3/17/2023 at 4:37 PM, OI1 said:

Is there a solution to this yet?

Not that I'm aware of. 

My site is having this issue as well.  It's been weeks and Google Site Console is specifically showing the error about there being duplicate content.  I've tried adding canonical tags and redirects to no effect.  

If I cannot resolve this issue soon, I will be forced to cancel my Squarespace subscription, request a refund, and re-create my site with another service.

I'm very disappointed that this issue has been known for years.  The positive marketing about Squarespace is not backed up by my experience with this hugely important aspect of websites (that Google can find them).

Same problemn over here. Not only the /home issue but also my blog page has de error 200 on ahrefs

https://www.trouwshoot.nl/videos

Here you can see filters for the articles. These filters are seen by Google as non-cononical pages.

I saw ealier in the thread about editing the robots.txt

Is this a good solution? And if so, how can you edit the robots.txt within SS?

On 1/19/2021 at 7:40 AM, JoshLasac said:

I am having the same problem. My sitemap has a URL that isn't even on my website. I have checked all the pages and the one that's included on my sitemap doesn't really exist. Please help me on this.

 

On 11/4/2020 at 4:32 AM, tnorman411 said:

Site URL: https://www.gravityonestudio.com/

Ahrefs is showing the following error:   Non-canonical pages listed in the sitemap.

Issue details  Non-canonical pages listed in the sitemap.  Sitemap files must list the pages you want search engines to crawl and index. All pages listed in a sitemap are suggested as canonicals for the search engine

Offending URL: https://www.gravityonestudio.com/home

Canoical URL:  https://www.gravityonestudio.com/

How do I fix this?   

This error message from Ahrefs indicates that some of the pages listed in your sitemap are not canonical, meaning that they may have duplicate content or similar pages on your website that are considered the primary version by search engines.

It's important to ensure that all pages in your sitemap are canonical to avoid confusion for search engines and to improve the indexing and ranking of your website. To fix this error, you should review your sitemap and remove any non-canonical pages or update them to the correct canonical version. You can also use canonical tags on your web pages to indicate the primary version of the content to search engines.

I'm getting same Non-canonical URL errors on my collection pages

Well I'm glad it's not just me. Currently having this issue. I imagine every Squarespace user does, just most don't know? 

19 hours ago, Xtian13 said:

Well I'm glad it's not just me. Currently having this issue. I imagine every Squarespace user does, just most don't know? 

Yep. 

Hello, I did a AHRefs audit and I fixed a lot of SEO issues on my website already, but there is one I cant get rid off.

the non canonical in question is my main url slug page /homepage

if anyone please can help me with that, pictures below

canonical is https://www.theinteriordoors.com/
the non-canonical is https://www.theinteriordoors.com/homepage (this one is the issue)
the sitemap is https://www.theinteriordoors.com/sitemap.xml

any update to this?  There are so so so many things that seem just to be glossed over on major fixes that need to happen with SS.  I'm an SEO and it's the same issues on all my sites.  I don't want to have to use another platform but it's starting to look like that's going to have to happen.  Super frustrating that there are so many known SEO type issues that SS isn't doing anything to fix.

5 hours ago, charlestonnikki said:

any update to this? 

Sadly, not that I am aware of… 

Wow. This has been going on for a long time! I'm having the same issues. It makes no sense. 

If I would have know that SquareSpace was so bad at responding to system issues and customer complaints, I would have went with a different platform. Extremely disappointed that I keep running into issues that many users have been experiencing for years, yet Squarespace has done nothing to address it

Same problem. Still no solution to this? This is ridiculous  

@CornCorn, sadly nothing has changed… 

Would love to see a fix here. Why is it that we still cant just set the slug as "/" for the homepage?

Wow crazy to read this thread and still no response from Squarespace. I am dealing with the same issue and its 2023. This thread goes back to 2021... seems like there is no resolution here and I might need to migrate over to a new provider.

Let me ask this, is there anyway to add custom code to the Home page? Ironically, every other page on the site allows you to hide it from indexing through a toggle and if I could hide the /home slug, I assume GSC would not see the redirect from .com > .com/home making it non-canonical.

I am betting the solution requires custom code on the site header which is a premium business feature which is why they did this. Also this reduces the costs associated with regular indexing all of their sites. I am betting 95% of people on Squarespace have no idea their home pages are not being indexed by Google and even possibly paying for Google Ads getting little to no results.

Squarespace is clearly not paying any attention to this thread.  I agree the sol'n probably requires custom code which requires pmt for their "premium business" tier. 

My site is not indexed at all - and I'm getting zero guidance from Squarespace in terms of remediation - so if I was paying for Google Ads it's possible that I'm literally getting nothing in return due to the fact that Google won't index my site and Squarespace won't help.

That's enough for me to quit Squarespace.  I've been with them for a decade.  Time for Weebly, Jimdo, Strikingly, Wordpress... literally anything but Squarespace!

Best approach (IMHO) is to work around it - think outside the square (No pun intended).

This works for me: https://viemedia/home

No system is perfect and no system will give thew user everything they need; and that comes from over a decade working on Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress*, and more recently SquareSpace.

From Google themselves.... possible solutions:

• Redirects: A strong signal that the target of the redirect should become canonical.
• rel="canonical" link annotations: A strong signal that the specified URL should become canonical.
• Sitemap inclusion: A weak signal that helps the URLs that are included in a sitemap become canonical.

The one stands out, for me,  is to do a redirect. BUT, as a redirect via SquareSpace is only possible for URL that don't exist, then a CDN is needed, I use Cloudflare and simply add a Rule for URL forwarding.

Simple. 

The second option is to add a rel="canonical" link to the Page Setting (Advanced), in Page Header Code Injection.
 

The answers are out there, you just need to ask Google, if the forum is not forthcoming :)