Google search console error: alternate page with proper canonical tag error

Hi there everyone,

I have recently got an error on my homepage which is stopping the most up to date version of it from being indexed - quite annoying!

The version of my homepage that is being indexed is www.baitboxvending.co.uk/ when the one that I require indexing is www.baitboxvending.co.uk/home. Googles indexing 'crawlers' are taking the former url as the canonical url, which means they essentially ignore the /home version. I don't even know where the www.baitboxvending.co.uk/ version came from as none of my pages on the squarespace editor have this url (as far as I can see, I'm no expert).

Just wondering if anyone else has this issue and knows how to fix it? 

Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

Best,

Leon

Hi Leon

Did you manage to fix this? I am having the same problem.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Claire

Your website's homepage URL -- which Google understands properly -- is: https://www.baitboxvending.co.uk

Do not link to or reference the "/home" URL.

I have the same issue where GSC is highlighting https://www.philnunez.com/home

I've gone to my home page settings in my SS dashboard and deleted /home from the url.

Should I request a reindex of https://www.philnunez.com or do I need to set up a redirect for this?

Many thanks

Hi @PEN_72 you don't need to do anything for Google to sort things out. Your site's homepage is: https://www.philnunez.com. When linking to your site, don't use the /home version. Many messages in GSC's indexing report are informational vs errors.

For some more context - Squarespace automatically hides the URL slug of your homepage so visitors see a clean URL. Technically the page's URL is philnunez.com/home, but the canonical tag tells search engines that the philnunez.com version of the page's URL should be indexed, instead. This avoids duplicate search results, which would negatively impact your site's SEO.

Google Search Console wasn't built with Squarespace's Content Management System in mind, so it will often produce some false errors that you don't need to worry about. There are a few others listed in Squarespace's guide - Understanding Google SEO emails and console errors