So, last summer last year I created my own website https://einmaligefilmecke.de/ with ghost. The major problem I have now with it, is that the individual subpages (i.e the film-reviews) cant be found on google and I really dont know why what to do now. For every post I added tags, excerpts and also the google meta-datas, like meta-title, meta-description and also canonical-URL and on top I added the URL to the meta-description. Did I forget something? What did I do wrong?
TL;DR: NEVER set a postās canonical URL to itself unless you want it to disappear.
When a page doesnāt appear in Google, the first question I always ask is: What do you see in Google Search Console? Soā¦ what do you see in Google Search Console? Are the pages discovered? crawled? indexed? Youāre going to need to share some details on the status of the pages that are perhaps missingā¦
OH. Hang on. You set the canonical URL. That is probably 100% your problem. (But you should really still go look in GSC, because itās good practice for solving future search problems.)
Generically, canonical URLs are used to tell a visiting search engine which copy of duplicate content is the ācanonicalā one. Only that canonical version gets indexed and returned in search results, ever. (Well, unless Google decides a different page is a better choice for the canonical url. Sometimes itāll decide to ignore you.)
By default, Ghost returns a canonical URL of the pageās own url and includes the page in the sitemap-posts.xml, which search engines use, UNLESS you set the canonical URL.
Hereās where it gets hairy: Ghost interprets any post for which you have set a canonical URL of any sort as meaning that that post is NOT the canonical version, and as a result, it does not include that post in the sitemap.
This makes a lot of sense if a page is not the canonical version. And no sense if you set the postās canonical url to itself. So, you should go back through your posts and REMOVE the canonical url you set for each post, unless it is set to somewhere other than the post itself. And then you should go into GSC and resubmit your sitemaps, request re-crawling, etc.
Thatāll probably fix it, but not instantaneously. Meanwhile, check in GSC for any other problems, too, so that you can hopefully solve problems in parallel instead of one at a time.
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and
Iām confused here. What do you mean by saying ānever set postās canonical URL to itselfā while this is the default behavior of Ghost itself?
If you fill in that field in the metadata section, ghost will not include the post in the sitemap.
In other words, if you want the default behavior, donāt fill in the canonical url field, because youāll prevent the default behavior, and get unwanted behavior instead.
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Thank you for the answers. First of all, I have removed the canonnical URL and now, I am waiting for the subpages to be crawled again. I hope that helps
I hope thatāll fix you up. You can also ask Google to re-index, and resubmit the sitemap, if you havenāt already.