That Scary Google Search Console Message About Canonical Tags? You Can Breathe.
You opened Google Search Console, saw a message about “canonical tags” or “Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical,” and your stomach dropped.
Sound familiar?
First: you are not the only photographer who has sent a slightly panicked DM asking what this means. And second: in the vast majority of cases, it means absolutely nothing is wrong with your website.
This is one of those things that looks alarming because it uses technical language, but once you understand what’s actually happening, you’ll wonder why you ever stressed about it. Let’s break it down.
THE SHORT VERSION
Canonical tags are a normal, helpful part of how Google reads your site. They are not a penalty and they do not hurt your rankings. Photographer websites on Showit often trigger this because of trailing slashes in URLs. 99% of the time there is nothing to fix. Check Search Console, confirm your pages are indexed, then close the tab and go shoot.
What Is a Canonical Tag, Actually?
When Google crawls your website, it sometimes finds two URLs that lead to the exact same content. Not because you did anything wrong, but because the internet has a quirk where one page can technically exist at multiple addresses at the same time.
A canonical tag is a small piece of code that tells Google: “Of all the versions of this page that might exist, this is the one that counts. Index this one.”
Think of it like the master file in your editing workflow. You might have exported the same gallery three different ways, but there is one version you want the client to receive. The canonical tag is how you point Google to that master file.
WORTH KNOWING: You do not have to add canonical tags yourself for this to work. Google is smart enough to pick a canonical version on its own. When you see this in Search Console, it means Google found the situation and handled it. That’s the system working correctly, not breaking.
Why This Happens on Photographer Websites
Here is what is happening behind the scenes on most Showit photographer websites.
Your site has a page, say your investment page. And that page technically exists at two different URLs at the same time:
yourname.com/investment (No trailing slash)
yourname.com/investment/ (Trailing slash → Google picks this as canonical)
The only difference is that tiny slash at the end. To you, those are obviously the same page. But technically, to a search engine, they are two separate URLs pointing to identical content.
So Google does exactly what it should do: it picks one, marks it as the canonical version, and ignores the other. That is the message you are seeing. Not an error. Not a problem. Just Google doing its job.
This is especially common on Showit builds, and it comes up across portfolio pages, gallery pages, session type pages, blog posts, all of it. It is a platform behavior, not a setup mistake on your part.
Should You Actually Worry?
Probably not. The real question is not whether canonical tags exist on your site. They will, and that is fine. The real question is whether your important pages are actually getting indexed and showing up in search.
Here is how to check. In Google Search Console, go to Indexing > Pages and look at what is and is not being indexed. If your homepage, your services pages, your about page, and your blog posts are showing as indexed, your SEO is working. The canonical message is just housekeeping.
The only time this becomes worth investigating is if you are seeing pages you care about sitting in the “Not indexed” column with no explanation, or if Google seems confused about which version of a page to rank. That is a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who can look at your specific setup.
What you can actually do right now
Open Search Console and go to Indexing > Pages
Click into the “Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical” report
Look at which pages are listed and compare the two URL versions it shows you
Confirm they really are the same page with just a trailing slash difference
If your pages are otherwise showing as indexed, you are done. Nothing to fix.
If a page you care about is not getting indexed at all, that is when to dig deeper
SEO is full of these moments where something looks scary from the outside and turns out to be completely normal once you understand what you are looking at. Canonical tags are one of the most common. Now you know what they are, why they happen, and what to do. Which is mostly: nothing.
If you want to know whether anything on your site actually needs attention, a full SEO audit will tell you exactly that, no guessing required.
Not sure what your site actually needs?
The Full Exposure Audit digs into your whole site and tells you exactly what to fix, what to leave alone, and where the real opportunities are. No guessing, no generic checklist.