Duplicate Pages Fix and Canonical Setup

Fixing duplicate pages and setting up canonical URLs

Thousands of pages in Search Console marked “Duplicate” or “Crawled — currently not indexed”? It is a typical store ailment, and the cure is not writing more text but technical settings.

Where duplicates come from

• Filters. Every combination is a separate URL. Three groups of five options produce hundreds of pages, and nearly all of them are almost identical.
• Sorting and pagination — the same content in a different order.
• One page under several URLs: with and without index.php, with and without a trailing slash, in different categories.
• Language versions that are not linked to each other correctly.
• Service parameters: ad campaign tags, session IDs.

What the real harm is

Not “penalties for duplicates” — there are none. The harm is more concrete: the crawler spends its crawl budget on endless combinations instead of product pages, and ranking signals are diluted across near-identical pages, so none of them reaches the top.

What I do

An audit of the current state using Search Console data and a site crawl. Canonical URL setup. Indexation rules for filters — singling out the combinations that have real demand and, on the contrary, deserve a page of their own. Pagination handling. Removing service parameters from the index. Verification with a repeat crawl.

About timing

The technical changes are quick, but reindexing takes weeks. There will be no sudden traffic jump the next day — this removes obstacles rather than adding speed.

Related: a technical audit if the problem has not been diagnosed yet, filter setup, hreflang for language versions.