Duplicate page without canonical tag excluded from Google Index

Question

In the Google Search Console I see a section under Index Coverage that shows a ton of URLS that have been excluded from the index with a status of Duplicate page without canonical tag.

Here is an example url:

https://www.example.com/elliptical-drive-belt&brand=Lifespan&product_type=Treadmill&category=Motor%20Control%20Boards

This page can also be accessed just by going to this URL:

https://www.example.com/elliptical-drive-belt

The parameters in the first URL allow the user to filter search results or defin their search further. How do I go about fixing this? Should I use the following code to create a cannonical reference from the page that has parameters to the one that doesn't? The 2 pages contain different information:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/elliptical-drive-belt" />

Answer 1

You can tell Google how to treat paramters in your URLs here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters?hl=en&authuser=0&siteUrl=

If you want Google to better understand your parameters and how to adjust your indexing based on them, I highly recommend that you add all of them to that page in the webmaster console.

Using <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/elliptical-drive-belt" /> in your pages with '&' parameters will greatly help Google know how to treat these (semi-duplicate) pages.