Canonicals & duplicates

Canonical target never returned 200 in this crawl

One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.

How serious: Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
Based on: Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.

What is wrong

Your pages use canonical tags—instructions telling search engines which version of a page is the "real" one when duplicates exist. However, the canonical targets our crawler tried to visit did not return a successful response (a 200 status code). This means the page that canonical tags are pointing to either does not exist, is temporarily unreachable, or is blocking automated access.

Why it costs you

When a canonical target is broken or missing, search engines cannot verify which page should be treated as the authoritative version. They may ignore the canonical instruction entirely and index duplicate or near-duplicate pages instead. This splits your ranking potential across multiple URLs and wastes crawl budget on pages you did not intend to rank.

How to fix it

Check each canonical tag to ensure it points to a real, working page on your site. Visit the URL in your browser to confirm it loads properly. If the target page has been deleted, update the canonical tag to point to the correct URL instead. If the canonical points to a page on another domain, verify that domain is still active and accessible. Make these corrections in your page templates if the canonical tags are generated automatically, so one fix applies to all pages using that template.

What the audit tests

The page the canonical points to was reached and loaded normally (status 200)

Check your site

Run a free audit of up to 300 pages. No card needed.

Start a free audit

Or check a single address with the free tool.

Other canonicals & duplicates checks

All 136 checks