Confused about " Duplicate without user-selected canonical"

Question

I'm confused about this error in Google console. It's telling me 2 pages are not indexed because of Duplicate without user-selected canonical. Both are the same page though. It's the main page of the website. https://example.com and https://example.com/index.html

I've seen several posts about this problem occurring for various reasons. This is not a complex site though, just a few simple pages of information. I hope someone can just give me a simple fix. I have made sure my sitemap only includes https://example.com

Do I add this to my main page... <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/index.html" /> Or this... <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com" /> Or is there a better fix?

Just to add something to this... Even though it's telling me the page isn't indexed. I see now that it really is. It appears in google searches. So, I suppose it's a meaningless error. Still not sure I need to use that canonical tag or not. I'm concerned if I use it, google with think my home page is a duplicate of something.

Answer 1

The only reason Google has found example.com/index.html is because

• There is an internal link to it - so change it to example.com
• There is an external link - redirect it to example.com in .htaccess

Or put a canonical tag to point to whichever url you prefer. I prefer the shorter one.