Posts on Next Js.
19 posts tagged "Next Js".
My canonical tags were deindexing my own articles. GA4 had been right all along.
GA4 showed 2 events per seven days across a site with 70+ articles. The first instinct was broken tracking. The real cause was canonical tags instructing Google to ignore the pages meant to rank — a discovery collapse that looks identical to a measurement failure until GSC gives it away.
Eight cannibalisation pairs, one prefix strip, one PR
A numeric prefix in every calculator slug had created eight cannibalisation pairs — Google couldn't determine which URL was authoritative, so neither ranked with confidence. The fix required one atomic operation across content, routing, and the internal link graph: universal prefix strip, 23 permanent redirects, every MDX cross-link repointed. Not three PRs. One.
Eight calculators were cannibalising each other. One prefix strip fixed it in 72 hours.
A site-wide SEO audit against ukcalculator.uk surfaced 8 routes competing with themselves for the same search intent. The fix — strip the NN- prefix, issue 308 redirects across 23 routes, repoint every internal cross-link — had to land as a single atomic operation or it would introduce crawl noise between deployments. Three days later, Google had started indexing.
Google ranks URLs, not intentions: the NN- prefix strip that resolved eight cannibalisation pairs on ukcalculator.uk
A site-wide SEO audit of ukcalculator.uk surfaced eight cannibalisation pairs before a single meta-tag was touched. The common thread: a numeric sort prefix on every affected slug, one that had never been intended as a ranking signal. Fixing the URLs outweighed everything else in Phase 1.