See whether your page declares a canonical URL, whether it points at itself, and where it points if it does not. The quiet cause of pages that will not rank.
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Runs the full audit on your live site. Your report opens in your dashboard.
This reads the rel=canonical link on the page, resolves it against the page URL so a relative value is judged correctly, and reports whether it points at this page or at a different one. It runs with the URL shape check, which flags the things that create duplicates in the first place: capital letters in the path, stacked query parameters, and paths long enough to be truncated when shared.
A canonical tag tells search engines which of several similar URLs is the real one, and every ranking signal is consolidated onto that URL. Point it at the wrong place and you have donated your own page to another one, permanently and silently. Most sites generate more duplicates than they realise: tracking parameters, uppercase and lowercase variants, print views and pagination all produce URLs that compete with the page you meant to publish.
No canonical is a warning, because a search engine will pick one for you and it may not pick the URL you want. A canonical pointing elsewhere is reported as information rather than an error, because it is legitimate on a duplicate and catastrophic on the original, and only you know which page you are looking at. If a page you want ranked canonicalises to something else, that is the whole explanation for why it does not rank.
The canonical target is the single most broken thing we measure on professional sites, and a one-page check can only tell you about one page. The audit crawls, which is what turns this from a curiosity into a finding: two hundred pages canonicalising to one is a pattern nothing else surfaces.
The most common canonical fault we measure, and it fails on roughly a third of the professional sites we have audited.
The canonical points at the apex; the apex redirects to www; www is the page you are already on. The instruction is a loop with a redirect in the middle of it, on every page, forever. Nothing breaks and nothing warns you — canonical is a hint rather than a directive, so a search engine resolves the ambiguity itself and may not resolve it your way. The variants are all the same shape: a canonical to http on a site that redirects to https, or to a path without a trailing slash on a platform that adds one.
<!-- served at https://www.example.com/pricing/ -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pricing/">
$ curl -sI https://example.com/pricing/
HTTP/2 301
location: https://www.example.com/pricing/Yes as a default. It costs nothing, it settles parameter and case variants before they become a problem, and it removes any ambiguity about which version of a URL is the one you meant.
No. It is a strong hint, not a directive. If the signals conflict, for example the canonical says one thing and the sitemap and internal links say another, a search engine can choose differently. Keep those signals consistent.
Redirect when only one URL should ever be reachable. Canonical when both need to work for users but only one should be indexed, which is the usual case for filters, parameters and print views.
Written up properly, for the question a result usually raises next.
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