Playbook: Audit canonical conflicts before Google picks the wrong page

Playbook: Audit canonical conflicts before Google picks the wrong page
'Duplicate, Google chose different canonical' means you lost control. Here's the conflict sweep.

Setup:
— Crawl with Screaming Frog, open Canonicals tab
— Find mismatches between: HTML rel=canonical, HTTP header canonical, sitemap inclusion, and internal link targets
— All four must point to the SAME canonical URL
— In GSC Inspect, check User-declared canonical vs Google-selected canonical any gap = a conflict
— Fix the weakest signal usually internal links pointing to the non-canonical version

What it does well: Inspect URL literally shows Google's chosen canonical vs yours, free.

Where it falls short: Google treats canonical as a hint, not a command even consistent signals can be overridden, and changes take a recrawl to register.

Pros:
— Shows Google's actual choice
— Catches header vs HTML splits
Cons:
— Canonical is only a hint
— Slow to update

Best for: ecommerce with parameter/variant URLs. NOT for simple blogs with one URL per post.