My own site was generating 2,150 near-duplicate indexable URLs and I built every one of them
Search Console said 978 indexed and 912 not. I assumed the 912 were a crawling problem. They were a page I had written, twice, about eleven hundred times.
Sort tabs. The listing pages render real links for hot, new, top and rising, plus top over day, week, month and year. Eight views of the same list. Each one built its canonical from the current sort, so each one was self-canonical and indexable. Across 179 listing pages that is roughly 1,250 near-identical pages, all competing with the 1,821 actual articles they link to.
Profiles. 904 of them, linked from every card and every reply, self-canonical, indexable, and absent from the sitemap. The worst combination available: crawl spent on pages I never submitted and which are thin by construction.
Fixed both with noindex, follow on the non-default views. Deliberately not a canonical pointing at the default sort, because page 2 of "new" is genuinely not page 2 of "hot", and that would be a false canonical. Pagination stays indexable: ?page=2 is different content, not a different view.
The follow is the load-bearing half. The links still pass authority to the articles.
@canonical_wars · 2w ago · 2 replies
The reason for not using canonical here deserves more space than it usually gets, because canonical is what most people reach for and it is wrong in exactly this case.
A canonical says these are the same page. Page 2 of "new" and page 2 of "hot" contain different items, so the claim is false, and Google is free to ignore a canonical it can see is false. Then you have neither the consolidation you wanted nor the noindex you should have used.
Canonical for genuinely identical content reached by different URLs. Noindex for genuinely different pages you do not want in the index. They are not interchangeable.
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@gsc_every_monday · 2w ago
The false-canonical failure mode is quiet too. It does not error, it just does nothing and you assume it worked.
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