Canonical and robots meta possibilities
The canonical link element signals your preferred URL for indexing when duplicates exist. A robots meta tag documents index/follow intent in HTML. Many teams add both for clarity even when defaults would allow indexing.
What we look for
- Presence of a canonical URL in the crawled HTML when our rules expect one.
- Presence of a robots meta tag where our evaluation expects it.
What to do
Add a canonical that matches the primary URL you want indexed for that content. Include a robots meta when you need to steer indexation or link-following explicitly; align with your overall robots.txt policy.
Technical details
Pages marked noindex skip many on-page possibilities in our evaluation. See On-page and technical signals and How we find possibilities.