Self-referencing canonicals: Crawl Audit check 36

Short answer: a canonical tag, <link rel="canonical" href="...">, tells search engines which URL is the main version of a page when the same content can be reached at several addresses. Check 36 wants the audited page's canonical to point at itself. Google treats a canonical tag as "a strong signal", but "a hint, not a rule", so Google can still choose differently.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: there's a canonical tag, and its path matches the audited page's path.
• Warning: the canonical points to a different path. The report shows where.
• Fail: there's no canonical tag.

Crawl Audit compares the path only, so a canonical pointing to the same path on another host (such as www.) still passes here. Check that the host and protocol are right yourself. Check 37 also fails when the tag is missing, so one missing tag shows up twice in the report.

What Google says

• A rel="canonical" link is "A strong signal that the specified URL should become canonical." A sitemap is "A weak signal".
• "Google may choose a different page as canonical than you do, for various reasons. That is, indicating a canonical preference is a hint, not a rule."
• "The rel="canonical" link element is only accepted if it appears in the <head> section of the HTML".
• "Use absolute paths rather than relative paths with the rel="canonical" link element."

Search Console reports when Google disagrees. "Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" means you marked a page as canonical but Google indexed another one instead.

Why self-referencing is the safe default

A page can be reached through more URLs than you'd think: with tracking parameters, with or without www, with a trailing slash. A canonical pointing at the clean URL tells Google which one you mean. Every page on this site carries one. The homepage's is https://devmarde.com, and it sits in the <head>, including when Googlebot asks for the page.

On your platform

• WordPress: SEO plugins normally output a canonical on posts and pages. Check one in view-source (Ctrl+U) and search for rel="canonical".
• Shopify: themes use the canonical_url object, "The canonical URL for the current page", in the theme layout.
• Wix: the default is <link rel="canonical" href="{your-page-url}"/>, editable in the page's advanced SEO settings.
• Next.js: set alternates: { canonical: "/path" } in the page's metadata, with metadataBase set so it becomes an absolute URL.

Sources

• Google Search Central, How to specify a canonical URL (updated 10 July 2026) and What is canonicalization (updated 20 August 2026), checked 3 October 2026.
• Google Search Console Help, Page indexing report.
• Shopify, canonical_url; Wix, Default SEO settings; Next.js, generateMetadata.