Trouble understanding canonical tags

[Christopher_G]

Using sitechecker.pro and having an issue I can't seem to resolve:

Search engines see your https://www.capturethestarsworkshops.com and https://www.capturethestarsworkshops.com/index.html (or https://www.capturethestarsworkshops.com/index.php) as different pages.

If you don't explicitly tell Google which URL is canonical, Google will make the choice for you, or might consider them both of equal weight, which might lead to unwanted behavior.

To consolidate duplicate URLs use Google article and our guide.

Can anyone explain to me how to fix this?
Thank you!
Christopher

[Adam7]

Add this to the Header Code field for your home page on the Pages tab, @Christopher_G:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.capturethestarsworkshops.com" />

That should get you what you need.

[Christopher_G]

Thanks for the response.  I've already tried this and have no results.  Still receiving the error message.
Not really sure what else to try.  I've been researching online and can't seem to find a solution.

[Adam7]

I wonder if you need to have Google to a fetch request specifically for /index.html? It might be relying on a cached version that doesn't have the link tag.

[Christopher_G]

Hey Adam, 
How would I go about doing that?

Thank you,
Christopher

[Adam7]

It isn't possible to get rid of ".html" from pages of your site, although they can all be accessed without it ( /contact will load the same page as /contact.html ).

In terms of Google, I can't see it making much difference whether the page indexed is /contact or /contact.html. Every site on the internet will have an index.html page as the root page for the site (it could also be index.php or a different extension, but the file is always there).  I'm not an SEO expert so I can't really say what difference it would make setting the canonical URL as the non .html version; that's the correct tag if you want to try it, though.

[Wi_Paul]

Hi Adam

I've seen a lot of chat about canonical and you seem to know what to do.

I have /index.html on my home page (for some reason, I don't know why).

I want my homepage to be https://www.mysite.co.uk (not with index.html at the end and not 2 pages).

I think you are saying add a canonical tag in the pages' SEO header...

Please can you tell me if it is this?
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite.co.uk">

And for my bonus question: I want to get rid of the .htmls that are all over the site
Can I add a canonical tag as above on every page like this?

Will it work? Is it bad?

eg

https://www.mysite.co.uk/contact.html

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.mysite.co.uk/contact">

Thanks
Paul

[ChrisFletcher]

I also would like to put the same question to Adam. I have spent 2 full days searching for the answer to this problem  without finding a solution. It's so frustrating

[Adam7]

To my knowledge, I haven't really seen anyone with a Weebly-built site having trouble with Google giving equal weight to /index.html and /.  You could add a canonical link with one or the other if you wanted, but in general I don't think you really need to worry about it.