Your canonical points to staging. Is that what you intended?

A different canonical is a reason to review

A canonical link can intentionally identify another version of a page. A tracking URL may point to a clean URL, for example. A different destination is not automatically an error.

After a release, however, a canonical pointing to a temporary staging hostname deserves a close look. Compare it with the URL you intend search engines to treat as the preferred version.

Inspect the response after redirects

Start with a specific important page. Follow its redirects and note the final host and path. Inspect the HTML head for a link whose rel attribute includes canonical. A relative canonical is resolved against the document base URL.

The following command saves the response for inspection. Avoid assuming that a search for the word canonical identifies a valid link element.

curl -sS -L -D headers.txt https://your-site.com/pricing -o page.html
# Inspect the final URL and HTML <head>.
# Also inspect HTTP Link headers if your server uses them.

Find where the destination is built

Check site URL environment variables, CMS site settings, hard-coded absolute URLs, and shared metadata configuration. In Next.js, review metadataBase alongside any explicit canonical value.

Changing metadataBase does not replace every absolute URL you may have written elsewhere. Check representative pages from different route templates, then redeploy and inspect their production responses.

Make the preferred URL consistent

If the destination was accidental, update the configuration that generates it. Use the intended preferred URL consistently in internal links and sitemaps where appropriate. Avoid adding a second conflicting canonical while leaving the first one in place.

Google treats canonical declarations as signals and can select a different canonical. Use Search Console to compare the declared canonical with Google’s selected canonical for a property you control.

Recheck the pages that pay the bills

A lightweight release baseline can cover the homepage, pricing page, and a few acquisition pages. Compare both the observed canonical and the final URL after a deployment.

CrawlPatch’s current checker inspects HTML canonicals and marks a different destination for review. It does not inspect HTTP Link canonicals or reproduce Google’s canonical-selection process. Use the evidence within that scope.