"Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" in paginated

[guarriman3]

Hi,

Sorry if this question is an old one, but I would like to clarify what I understood about canonical metatagas on paginated pages.

As far as I knew, each one of the paginated pages must include the canonical metatag towards itself:

https://example/category_A?page=2 ----> https://example/category_A?page=2 (not towards "page=1")

However, I've found hundreds of "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" URLs within my "Google Search Console > Coverage > Excluded" section.

If I inspect the 'https://example/category_A?page=2' URL in Google Search Console:

User-declared canonical: https://example/category_A?page=2
Google-selected canonical: https://example/category_A?page=1

What am I doing wrong?

[not2easy]

This is a common mistake. Paginated content is all relative to its first page. Using canonical links to subsequent pages can prevent those pages from being crawled and indexed. This is the most likely reason that Google has selected the fist page as canonical, in order to include the rest of the pages.

You can see this listed as "Mistake #1" on their old blog article: [developers.google.com...]

Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:

example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
and so on

Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all.

[NickMNS]

! Careful !
The link from not2easy dates back to 2013 and makes recommendations that are deprecated or no-longer supported:

If rel=canonical to a view-all page isn't designated, paginated content can use rel="prev" and rel="next" markup.

rel="prev" and rel="next" are no longer supported.

That said, the general idea remains valid.

Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages.

Simply remove the canonical link tags and it should correct the problem.

[lucy24]

Edit: I was typing while Nick was posting, so this is purely a reply to OP and not2easy.

Am I reading OP upside-down? From where I'm sitting, it looks as if guarriman is doing exactly what G wants you to do (page2 canonical to page2), while G is doing what they tell you not to do (page2 canonical to page1).
? ? ?

In any case, do you really need a canonical meta if it's just pointing to the identical URL? Seems like it's only needed if you have the same content reachable by multiple URLs.

[not2easy]

The page where I got that antique link is more current but unrelated to this topic (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls). I linked to the older page because that is where they said it is a common canonical error. Yes, the rel=prev/next is out of use for some time.

The thing is that paginated content is not duplicate content. As NickMNS stated, canonical meta tags to a different page are for duplicate content. That is the text that I quoted from the article. Sorry about the confusion. Too many tabs open...