Is it okay to remove the duplicate pages from my sitemap?
I am using WPML to translate/duplicate my pages and Yoast for my SEO.
I duplicated my pages and assigned a canonical url. E.g, example.com/sg/page1, example/com/uk/page1
Our main issue is that Google Search Console is throwing us with an error "page is not indexed duplicate google chose different canonical than user". We also added some changes to these duplicate pages like adding the country name, re arranging team members, etc yet we still got this error.
I reached out with Yoast and they said I need to remove these duplicate pages to my sitemap. Would that fix my indexing issue?
If you have rel=canonical fixed already and it didn't help, I'd try to remove those duplicate pages from sitemap.
Also check, if there isn't canonical self-reference on those duplicate pages. This could be strong signal so only reference canonical pages.
I'd also check for internal links to non-canonical pages and remove those (if possible).
If Google finds strong signals that a duplicate page is more important than its canonical version, this scenario happens. So I'd make sure to show that the canonical page is the most important one.
Use hreflang attribute to avoid the duplicate content issue. More information is here,
https://www.semrush.com/blog/hreflang-attribute-101/
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