Canonical Issues with Blogger

It's the morning of Father's Day, and I have a full day of cleaning, cooking, and hosting my family ahead of me. I wanted a nice quiet start to the morning, but instead, Google had other plans.  

I have received at least one email a week from Google for the past few years telling me there is something wrong with my website, Lavender Inspiration: Life Blogs. The problem is that there are no easy fixes.  The emails are geared toward tech geniuses and code writers who know what they're doing. This is one reason I created this new blog, hoping that the settings would all be current. 

Take this latest email below. So, I did what any reasonable layperson would do. First, I Googled the term "canonical" to try and determine how it is being used in this context. From what I could determine, the word means that posts on my other blog - 37 or more of them according to the analytics - do not have the proper url line. 

Page indexing issues detected in lavenderinspiration.com

To the owner of lavenderinspiration.com:

Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 1 Page indexing issue(s). The following issues were found on your site.

Top Issues

• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search.

I have no idea how this happened or how to fix it. I wish it were as simple as clicking a button and having Google handle everything, but apparently that is not the case. So, now on top of trying to just enjoy the blogging process again, I am dealing with technicalities. 

From what I can determine, the instructions (below) to fix the errors are, at the very least, mind-boggling and figuring them out is not not how I wish to spend my day. Needless to say, the "Inspect this URL" link in the following instructions lead to yet another page with more instructions. Investigating this further led me deeper into a rabbit hole and a final determination that only 300 pages were properly indexed, while nearly 2,000 were not. 

It is beyond frustrating that Google would want its blogging platform to be so incredibly user UNFRIENDLY. I wish I could say that this in the only issue that needs addressing. Those of you who use Blogger know how many changes and so-called improvements the platform has made over the last several years. If anyone has any tips on dealing with this issue in particular, please comment below. In the meantime, I am going to need another cup of coffee.

Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user

This page is marked as canonical for a set of pages, but Google thinks another URL makes a better canonical. Google has indexed the page that we consider canonical rather than this one.

1. Inspect this URL to see the Google-selected canonical URL under Page indexing > Google-selected canonical.
2. Look at the canonical you chose under Page indexing > User-declared canonical.
3. In your browser, look at the current page, the user-declared canonical, and the Google-selected canonical.
4. This error means that Google thinks that the tested page isn't a duplicate of the user-declared canonical. Instead, Google thinks that the tested page is a duplicate of the Google-selected canonical.
   • If the Google-selected canonical is the tested page, then Google thinks that the tested page isn't similar to any other pages.
   • If the user-declared canonical is not similar to the current page, then Google won't ever choose that URL as canonical. A duplicate page must be similar to the canonical. (That's what duplicate means.)