Duplicate Pages Fix and Canonical Setup

Removing duplicate pages and setting up canonical URLs

Thousands of pages in Search Console marked "duplicate" or "crawled, currently not indexed"? That is a standard e-commerce ailment, and the cure is technical configuration rather than writing more text.

Where duplicates come from

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

Why it genuinely hurts

Crawl budget is spent on combinations instead of new products, internal link equity is spread across hundreds of weak pages, and a narrow two-product selection can outrank the category it belongs to.

What I do

1. Map the real scale of the problem from Search Console and server logs, not from guesswork.
2. Decide, per page type, what should be indexed and what should not.
3. Set canonical URLs — exactly one per page; two are ignored by search engines entirely.
4. Configure robots directives and URL parameter handling.
5. Link language versions correctly so they stop competing.
6. Re-check after crawling has settled, typically two to four weeks later.