Why it matters on an HVAC site
Location pages are the problem. Forty pages that differ only in the city name are near-duplicates whatever the template claims, and Google will pick one of them to represent the set. That choice is often not the one you would have made, and the pages it did not pick stop appearing at all.
The second source is quieter: the same service page reachable at a trailing-slash and non-trailing-slash URL, at http and https, and at www and non-www, which is four versions of every page on the site before anyone has written anything.
How to check it yourself
- Search Console URL Inspection reports the "Google-selected canonical" beside your declared one. Where they disagree, Google has overruled you.
- A crawl that lists every page whose declared canonical points elsewhere, which finds accidental self-exclusion.
- Fetching each URL variant and confirming the redirects resolve to one form.
Worked through in numbers
An AC repair page ranks in one town and is invisible in the four around it. URL Inspection on the four missing pages returns a Google-selected canonical pointing at the first town’s page, not their own.
The four pages shared 94% of their words with the first. Google treated them as one page and picked the oldest.
Rewriting three of the four with genuinely local content, which meant permit rules, the two commonest system types in that housing stock and real job examples, and consolidating the fourth into the first, ended the overrule on the three that stayed.
Where this sits in the rankings
Scored under Technical SEO. Telling Google which of several near-identical pages is the one that counts.