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I have created a small website named https://www.example.co.uk. I have managed to index the majority of pages on my website however the home page is not being indexed as Google is defining it as a 'Duplicate without user-selected canonical'. However my domain, example.co.uk is completely unrelated to the the Google selected canonical of https://www.anothersite.example/. I don't know how Google could think this is a duplicate or how to correct it.

URL inspection

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  • Have you just purchased the domain recently?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Jul 6, 2022 at 13:43
  • I bought the domain about 2 months ago
    – PT123
    Jul 8, 2022 at 9:58
  • Is it a fresh domain or has it been registered before?
    – Mike Ciffone
    Jul 8, 2022 at 14:53

2 Answers 2

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As implied by others, the previous usage could be the cause for pointing to this page.

However, GSC is telling you that you haven't set a canonical for your page.

Put a line like this in the head section of you page.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.co.uk">
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Google indicates the page was crawled on May 28th 2022, so the reasonable conclusion is somebody used the domain the past, and at the time the URL had identical content to Google's selected canonical.

I think you should do two things. First add a canonical url, as Rohit Gupta suggested. Then click on the request indexing link at the top right of the page[1]. It would take Google a couple of days to crawl and index the page, but then it would realize it has different content & canonical, and will serve it in the search results. It might be a good idea to create a sitemap.xml, and mark the home page with high priority and high change frequency[2] until its crawled.

  1. This is to trigger a crawl ASAP. If Google thinks a page is disinteresting, it might take its time crawling it again. There are pages with redirect on my website that haven't been crawled since 2020, and a page marked as duplicate without user selected canonical that hasn't been crawled since 2017. Google's crawler ignored it for two month, I think its best not to wait for it to come around of its own accord.
  2. https://slickplan.com/blog/xml-sitemap-priority-changefreq#:~:text=Sitemap%20priority%20allows%20a%20search,page%20search%20engine%20result%20rankings.
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