Canonical Chaos: Why Your Site is Fighting Itself

In practice, it’s just a tiny HTML tag <link rel="canonical"> that stops duplicate URLs fighting each other in search.

When it works, duplicate content collapses into one clean URL.

When it doesn’t, Google picks whatever version it feels like – sometimes the worst one.

And that’s where the canonical chaos kicks in.

How Sites Screw This Up

Canonical chaos looks like this:

/page vs /page/ → two URLs, same content, double the mess.
http:// vs https:// → are we seriously still doing this in 2025?
Every single page pointing to / → congrats, your entire site is one page now.
Query strings sneaking into canonicals → ?utm_campaign=fakeguru forever immortalized.

Bad example:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/?utm_campaign=garbage">

Good example:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page">

It’s like naming every single file on your laptop “final-v2-FINAL-this-one.pdf.” You know it’s a disaster. Google does too.

How to Stop the Chaos

Here’s how to stop pissing off search engines:

1: Pick a format and stick with it.
Always HTTPS. Decide on trailing slash or not – just be consistent.

2: Set the canonical yourself

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page">

3: Strip the junk.
Canonicals should never include UTMs, session IDs, or random tracking crap.

4: Audit your site.
Crawl it. If every page canonicals to /, fix it before Google buries you.

A Cleaner Canonical in Code

Here’s a simple Express/Node fix that outputs clean canonicals without query strings:

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  const url = new URL(req.protocol + '://' + req.get('host') + req.originalUrl);
  url.search = ''; // strip query strings
  res.locals.canonical = url.href;
  next();
});

Template example:

<link rel="canonical" href="<%= canonical %>">

Canonical tags aren’t some mystical SEO hack. They’re name tags for your pages.
Get them wrong, and Google will call you by the wrong name – and maybe forget you exist at all.