Google Search Data Issues detected

Hi there @wmhit ,

Can you share the link to your site page that “produce” these google errors?

Thanks,
Savvas

Thanks @savvasha

here is a couple (of many examples)
https://worldmastershockey.org/team/england/England-O55-men/
https://worldmastershockey.org/team/Scotland/Scotland-O40-Women/

where it appears google indexing is saying it cant index
Last crawled on 23 Sept 2024, 17:34:46

any thoughts on how to investigate this would be appreciated

regards

Ian

Hi @wmhit ,

To fix error Date/time not in ISO 8601 format in field ‘startDate’ please copy event-list.php template file from wp-content/plugins/sportspress/templates/ to wp-content/themes/your-child-theme/sportspress/ and alter line 315 as below:

FROM:

echo '<td class="data-date" itemprop="startDate" content="' . esc_attr( mysql2date( 'Y-m-d\TH:iP', $event->post_date ) ) . '" data-label="' . esc_attr__( 'Date', 'sportspress' ) . '">' . wp_kses( $date_html, array( 'a' => array( 'href' => array(), 'itemprop' => array() ), 'date' => array() ) ) . '</td>';

TO:

echo '<td class="data-date" itemprop="startDate" content="' . esc_attr( mysql2date( 'Y-m-d\TH:i:sP', $event->post_date ) ) . '" data-label="' . esc_attr__( 'Date', 'sportspress' ) . '">' . wp_kses( $date_html, array( 'a' => array( 'href' => array(), 'itemprop' => array() ), 'date' => array() ) ) . '</td>';

The error message you’re encountering, Page is not indexed: Alternative page with proper canonical tag, typically indicates that Google has found an alternative version of the page and has decided to index that version instead, usually based on the canonical tag present in the page’s metadata. This is probably made by a misconfigured SEO plugin.

If you already try to temporalily disable your SEO plugin and the issue is still there then you can try the following steps to fix this:

1. Check the Canonical Tag:
   View the page source of the URL and look for the canonical tag (<link rel="canonical" href="...">). Ensure it correctly points to the URL you want Google to index.
2. Review Google Search Console (GSC):
   In Google Search Console, inspect the URL under the Coverage report to get more details about why it’s not indexed and which page is being treated as the canonical version. You can also test the page for indexing issues using the “URL Inspection Tool.”
3. Ensure the Page is Unique:
   If the content on this page is very similar to another page (or an older version), Google may consider it duplicate content. In this case, modify the content to make it unique and valuable.
4. Resubmit the Page for Indexing:
   Once you fix the canonical issue, go back to Google Search Console and use the “Request Indexing” feature in the URL Inspection Tool to re-submit the page.
5. Internal Linking & Sitemaps:
   Ensure this URL is linked internally on the website and included in your sitemap. Proper internal linking signals to Google that the page is important.

Once these adjustments are made, Google should eventually crawl and index the correct version of the page.

Thanks,
Savvas

Thanks @savvasha

Appreciate the advice I will give that a try