Canonical points to a redirecting URL

What is wrong

Your site has a page that points to itself through another URL. Specifically, you have used a canonical tag—an instruction telling search engines which version of a page is the "real" one—but that instruction points to a URL that redirects somewhere else instead of going straight to the final destination. This creates an unnecessary step that search engines have to follow.

Why it costs you

Search engines may ignore the canonical tag and index the wrong version of your page, or they may waste time following the redirect chain instead of understanding your site's structure clearly. Either way, you lose control over which page appears in results, and search engines spend their crawl budget less efficiently on your site.

How to fix it

Fix this by changing the canonical tag to point directly to the final URL after all redirects have finished. Find the `<link rel="canonical">` tag in your page's HTML head section and update its `href` attribute to the URL that actually returns a 200 status code, not an intermediate redirect. If you use a template system for your site, make this change in the template itself rather than updating each page individually.