Google does not choose user selected canonical for home page

Question

We recently launched a new website and besides all other pages being indexed properly, our home page is not indexed by Google.

1. On our Homepage https://diagnostics.roche.com/ we set the canonial URL to "https://diagnostics.roche.com/global/en/home.html"

2. When opening this URL in google search console it says: Google-selected canonical: https://diagnostics.roche.com/

   

3. Looking up https://diagnostics.roche.com/ in google search console, it says it is indexed:

   

4. When running info:diagnostics.roche.com -> it shows that not the original set canonical URL is indexed but the google selected one.

Any idea how to fix it? We don’t even show up on google for our branded search terms. The goal is to have this URL being indexed as the original: https://diagnostics.roche.com/global/en/home.html

Answer 1

Thats because your multilanguage structure is an absolute mess, sorry for that.

You have a banch of sites, for many countries and languages, like https://diagnostics.roche.com/nz/en_us/home.html, but many of them don't have both of canonical and hreflang. Thats why Google doesn't understand your whole site structure.

You should establish for every of your language and country an extra Search Console property. Beside of this, you should tie all of your country and laguage versions with canonicals and hreflangs, according to Google guidelines.

Don't underestimate the importance of canonical+hreflang on multilanguage sites. The problem you currently face, is one of the innocuous kind - it could become much more harmful, like completely disappearing of sites from index.

PS: your site represents the strong well-known brand. Google is always benevolent to such sites. But it doesn't mean, that Google will fully understand your site, if you doesn't deliver enough clear signals for that.