Usually nothing. This status means the URL’s canonical tag points at another page, and Google followed it and indexed that page instead. For tracking, sort and print copies, that’s what you want. If a page you want found is on the list, its tag points the wrong way. Fix that tag.
How to tell if a URL in the list is a problem
One store owner put it plainly in Shopify’s community: Search Console showed “over 12K Alternate pages with proper canonical tag,” so “How do I know if there are issues within these?”
The count won’t tell you. Most sites make plenty of copies without trying: a link with a tracking code, a sorted list, a print view. Open the status in Search Console’s Page indexing report and ask one question of each URL in the examples list. Is this a copy of another page, or a page with its own content?
The fastest sign is the URL itself. Most copies have a ? and a parameter added to the end, like ?sort=oldest. A clean URL you’d want a buyer to land on is the one to fix: its own tag told Google to skip it, and Google did.
Watch the count over time, too. If it jumps right after you ship a release, check what that release changed in your page templates.
Why “proper” doesn’t mean right
Google’s description says the page “correctly points to the canonical page, which is indexed, so there is nothing you need to do.” That’s two checks: the tag names another page, and that page is indexed. Nobody checked that it’s the page you meant.
Google treats a canonical tag as “a hint, not a rule,” and uses it to choose between pages that look alike. So a wrong tag lands a page here when it points at a page that looks almost the same, and templates make a lot of those. Google’s 2013 list of canonical mistakes and its troubleshooting guide name the usual suspects:
- A tag copied with the template“If you use a template, check that you didn’t also copy the rel=canonical specification.” Build 40 integration pages from one, and all 40 can point at the first.
- Page 2 pointing at page 1In Google’s words, a canonical “from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct.” Your blog, changelog or docs index loses every page past the first.
- A category page pointing at one articleGoogle says to avoid it. The category page drops out in favor of the article.
- A plugin that sets the wrong tagGoogle warns that some CMS plugins “can make incorrect use of canonicalization techniques to point to undesired URLs.”
A page on this list isn’t indexed, so it can’t show in Google Search. It can’t be a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode either, because Google requires a page to be “indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet” first. For a copy, that’s fine: the page it names shows instead. For an integration page buyers look for, it’s the same loss as a page that’s crawled but not indexed.
How to fix alternate page with proper canonical tag
Do this for the pages with their own content.
- See what the page namesPaste the URL into URL Inspection in Search Console. User-declared canonical is the URL your page names. Google-selected canonical is the one Google kept.
- Find what writes the tagOpen the page in your browser’s developer tools and search the head for rel="canonical". Then find the template, plugin setting or SEO field that fills it in. If a CMS plugin gets it wrong, Google’s advice is to report it to the CMS provider.
- Point it at the page itselfA real page should name its own URL.
- Fix the template, then check its siblingsIf one template wrote the wrong tag, every page built from it has the same bug. Open two or three of them and check their tags before you call it done.
- Ask Google to look againRequest indexing for a page or two (there’s a daily limit), or click Validate fix for the group. Validation “typically takes up to about two weeks.” If Google hasn’t crawled a page at all yet, that’s a different status: discovered - currently not indexed.
Skip two fixes that look tempting. Don’t block the copies in robots.txt. Google “may still index URLs that are disallowed in robots.txt without their content.” The Shopify owner above tried it, and it changed nothing. And don’t noindex them to force a choice, because noindex “will completely block the page from Search.”
Should every page have a canonical tag?
You don’t have to. Google says your site “will likely do just fine without specifying a canonical preference.” We’d still add one. Google recommends a self-referencing tag on the canonical page itself, and it settles every tracking or sort copy of that page in advance.
Here’s what it looks like. It goes in the head section of the page’s HTML, with the full URL:
In the head of example.com/integrations/salesforce
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/integrations/salesforce">Syntax from Google’s guide to consolidating duplicate URLs (updated July 10, 2026). Google supports relative URLs but recommends the full one. A tag in the body is ignored.
Alternate page vs. the other canonical statuses
Three canonical statuses in Search Console are easy to mix up. This is the only one where Google did what your tag asked.
Checking that every page buyers need is indexed under the URL you chose is part of the work we do for 30+ software companies, for $2,000 a month.
Questions
What does “canonical page” mean?
It’s the one URL Google keeps when it finds several that look alike: the URL it chose as “the most representative from a set of duplicate pages.” The others stay out of Search.
Do lots of alternate URLs hurt my rankings?
No. They’re copies Google set aside in favor of the page they name. Google’s John Mueller has said there’s “no penalty or ranking demotion” for several URLs with the same content, and that “almost all sites have it in variations.”