How To Fix “Alternate Page With Proper Canonical Tag” On WooCommerce

If you look after a WooCommerce store, there’s a good chance the indexing report in Google Search Console shows a long list of URLs under Alternate page with proper canonical tag. Google doesn’t treat it as an error, but it’s still a problem. Every one of those URLs is a page Google spent time crawling when it usually didn’t need to, because it’s just another version of a page you already have.

Cleaning this up helps Google spend its crawl time on the pages that matter, and in our experience fixing canonical problems can lift rankings noticeably. It also takes pointless load off your server.

What a Canonical Tag Actually Does

When several URLs show the same or very similar content, a canonical tag tells search engines which one is the main version to index. Without that signal, duplicates can confuse Google and spread your ranking strength across several URLs instead of one.

The report means Google found a duplicate, read its canonical tag and correctly worked out which page is the preferred one. Large sites see it often, and WooCommerce stores see it most of all, because products with attributes and variations naturally create multiple versions of the same page.

Why WooCommerce Stores Get So Many of These

Most of the URLs in this report come from a handful of sources:

• Add to cart and wishlist links. WooCommerce creates URLs like ?add-to-cart=123 for every product button, and crawlers happily follow them.
• Filtered and sorted product listings. Filtering by product attributes or sorting a category adds query strings, so Google sees one category as dozens of separate pages.
• Other query strings. Parameters added for tracking or filtering produce new URLs with the same content.
• Marketing tags. UTM parameters and Facebook’s fbclid tag on shared links create more duplicates.
• Search results. WordPress search pages can generate endless URL variations if Google crawls them.
• Login pages. Google crawling wp-login.php or similar login screens.
• HTTP and HTTPS, or www and non-www. If your site loads on more than one of these, every page exists several times over.
• Wrong canonical tags. Occasionally the tag itself points at the wrong version of the page.

Bots following add to cart links is also a performance problem, not just an SEO one. Each of those requests skips the page cache and hits PHP and the database. We cover that side in why WooCommerce add to cart is slow.

How to Fix It

1. Block the junk URLs in robots.txt

robots.txt tells search engines which URLs to leave alone. For a WooCommerce store, start by blocking the cart, wishlist, attribute and search URLs:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*add-to-cart=
Disallow: /*add_to_wishlist=
Disallow: /*attribute_
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /*?s=

For a complete WooCommerce robots.txt file and an explanation of each rule, see our WooCommerce robots.txt guide.

2. Correct any wrong canonical tags

Open a few of the URLs from the report and check where their canonical tag points. If it points at the wrong page, fix it in your SEO plugin or theme so it names the version you actually want indexed.

3. Keep product filtering and query strings under control

On WooCommerce stores, block the query strings you don’t need crawled and set up product filtering so it doesn’t turn each category into a pile of near identical URLs.

4. Redirect duplicate URLs with 301s

If the same page can be reached at more than one address, add a 301 redirect from each extra version to the preferred one so there’s only a single URL left for Google to find.

5. Load the site on one version only, and enable HSTS

Your store should load over HTTPS only, and on either www or non-www, never both. Anything on HTTP should redirect to HTTPS. This also helps speed, since plain HTTP can’t use the HTTP/2 protocol. On WP Alpha you can issue a free SSL certificate, then enable HSTS so browsers always go straight to HTTPS.

6. Validate the fix in Search Console

Once the changes are in place, open the report in Google Search Console and click Validate Fix. Google will recheck the affected URLs and confirm when the issue is resolved.

Test Before You Change Live Rules

A typo in robots.txt or a bad redirect can block pages you want in Google, so take a backup first and test bigger changes on a staging site where you can.