Major canonical issue on e-commerce site
Hi! I have a client with an e-commerce site, when I crawled it using Screaming Frog I found 38000 pages which 31000 are canonicalised and non-indexable. Looking at the page it seems like the CMS must be creating a duplicate of a product page and marking it as non-indexable and canonicalised, the pages has a different bread crumb structure so I'm guessing that might be the issue.
My question is, how do I go about solving it? Since the pages are marked no-index they don't really hurt but given the massive amount of canonicalised pages it would be nice to get rid of them. Do I 301 redirect the canonical page to the "real" page? Or should I remove them altogether? But I want to make sure not to loose any traffic/links to the site.
Happy for any advise on how to clean the site up! Thanks so much!
Your best bet is to 301 or label them as canonical. The following link has more information direct from Google. How to go about automating this process depends on the CMS.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/06/bye-bye-preferred-domain-setting.html
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