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Google is reporting that the pages I want to index are duplicates because I'm getting this message in my search console:

Duplicate without user-selected canonical

Problem is they are not duplicates. They are jobs I'm trying to get in Google's job search. Is there a way to me to indicate to Google's search bot that all my job pages should be indexed?

The documentation they provide tells me to put a link tag in the header to allow me to specify the canonical pages (rel="canonical"), but if I understand it correctly that would just telling Google they are duplicates, right?

Any help is appreciated.

EDIT

I was asked to show an example of two pages that are conflicting with each other.

Google thinks this page is the same as this one

EDIT #2

I added a bunch of og meta tags to the header, and added a section to the bottom of the page that pulls random jobs from the company and displays them at the bottom to add more unique content to the page. Still no telling me they are duplicates. I tried 2 new pages.

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  • Google generally doesn't tell you what its duplicate 'off' so how have you determined the URL is not accessible by other means? such as ?query-strings https vs http with / or without / with www or without www etc. Can you provide us a URL which has been marked duplicate, so I can check it for you?
    – Simon Hayter
    May 23, 2019 at 16:37
  • @SimonHayter I updated my original post with the info you requested.
    – Vandel212
    May 24, 2019 at 19:24
  • Do they render correctly using Google Fetch?
    – Simon Hayter
    May 24, 2019 at 23:48
  • I just checked and they render fine. I also think they do have unique content, but it is a bit thin. I'd recommend adding a self referencing canonical tag for each URL. i.e. use the official URL for each job. This can eliminate other issues, but I don't think this one.
    – Tony McCreath
    May 25, 2019 at 0:11
  • @SimonHayter I added a bunch of og meta tags to the header, and then added a "find more jobs" section at the bottom of the page that randomly displays 5 other jobs that company has open. So that should add some more unique content to the page, right? I'm all out of ideas, I mean it's a CMS system. Pages have set layouts, and data is pulled from the database to fill out the sections of the page dynamically. How does Google not have a way for people to indicate this? I'm nearly positive were not the first to do something like this haha.
    – Vandel212
    May 30, 2019 at 16:44

1 Answer 1

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Checking the examples you provided, both pages are nearly identical, except for a paragraph of text and a title. You are incurring in what Google describes, as a thin or duplicate content. They are so much alike that they are treated as a duplicate (even though they are not really).

You need to add more content to the page in order to make it more different between them two.

If you have a single page accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version and crawl that, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often.

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

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