Playbook: audit canonical consistency

Playbook: audit canonical consistency
Median site: 9.6% of pages have a canonical conflict (canonical ≠ self, or chain) — sample: 162 crawls. Conflicts split indexing signals.

Run:
— Step 1: crawl, capture declared canonical, HTTP canonical header, and og:url per URL
— Step 2: flag mismatches. Target self-canonical rate ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░ 92%+ on indexable templates
— Step 3: bucket conflicts: param-canonical-to-clean (good), canonical-to-redirect (bad, median 2.1%), cross-domain (audit), canonical-loops (fix now)
— Step 4: confirm canonical target returns 200 and is itself self-canonical (no chains)
— Step 5: cross-check Google's chosen canonical via URL Inspection on a 30-URL sample — disagreement rate median 14%

So what: your declared canonical is a hint, not a command. Where Google's chosen ≠ declared (median 14%), the real problem is duplicate signals, not the tag.