Suddenly bunches of odd canonical pages excluded - How to fix canonical errors

[Unshiny]

Hi All,

I'm fairly completely confused about what Google is doing to our website re: canonical pages and sudden exclusions.

For example, the search console is showing me more than a hundred URLs which were excluded which should be fine in the index. (I have looked at both the "old" search engine console and the new beta one.)

I have no clue what to do here. They are excluding things at random, it looks like. For example:

www.ouraddress.com/widget_store/blue_service/ABC_331_green_footballs.html

is suddenly "excluded" ... but not all of the ones similar to that URL. (e.g. blue_service/BDE_yellow_footballs.html

I have no idea where to even start here. The only other thing probably to note is that about a month ago, we marked all of the pages in our reference material under the "www.versionofoursite.com" as canonical, and the "versionofoursite.com" were not marked canonical.

I am about to try running a diagnostic with screaming frog. Any suggestions?

Also google's search engine is running like absolute crap this morning.

UGH. Thanks for reading...

Unshiny

[lucy24]

In addition to what GSC tells you, have you spot-checked in person? The new GSC seems very fond of claiming that suchandsuch page is intentionally not indexed, when in fact it comes through loud and clear. Try a few exact-text searches for the putatively excluded pages.

[keyplyr]

5 common mistakes with rel=canonical [webmasters.googleblog.com]

[Unshiny]

Thanks so much you guys! Will do.