SEO / PHP question
 

So I was just checking Google Seach Console and I have this message showing for a single page:

The page in questions, does have a canonical url in the html coding (domain.com/directory/) however, its is a templated page that is indexed as domain.com/directory/index.php?page=2

How would I potentially go about giving that page its own canononical url so that Google indexes it or, is this not something that I need to be concerned with generally?

hm. well that message generally means that the error "Duplicate without user-selected canonical” indicates that Google found duplicate URLs that are not canonicalized to a preferred version. Google didn't index these duplicate URLs, and assigned a canonical version on their own.

So for example if you've got a eCommerce site that also contains downloadable PDFs with the exact same product information as what's shown on product detail pages, you'll often find that Google has decided to canonicalize the PDFs to the product detail pages.

Ask yourself if these pages have a purpose - if your answer is no then simply remove these pages and return a HTTP status code 410.

Now if these pages do serve a purpose then canonicalize them to the preferred version of the URL. now where to canonicalize to? See which URL Google finds most relevant by using a URL Inspection tool. If Google's listing PDF files for your site, canonicalize them through the HTTP header.

If these pages don't carry any value, then make sure to apply the "noindex" directive through the meta robots tag or X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header.

Once again this is up to you

People often think of duplicate content as content copied over from another website. While in fact it refers to duplicate pages on the same site.

While Google strongly advise to not have multiple pages with the same content, there's situations where you simply have to have them and there's a justified use for that.
https://developers.google.com/search...uplicate-pages

So if you have the same content on multiple pages, just pick one url and point canonicals to it. Or as TheLegacy above said, you can add noindex to them if they are less important.

If you have links pointed to domain.com/directory/index.php?page=2 and it has to get ranked on Google, I would set canonicals as domain.com/directory/ so that url will get all the link juice.

If you want to make your urls search engine friendly a general advice is to avoid using index.php in the urls since it's redundant (index.php or index.html is usually a default file for serving a directory), so use only /directory/ instead and you are good to go. If you need pagination, your url domain.com/directory/index.php?page=2 could get http rewritten as domain.com/directory/2/ in .htaccess (or nginx rewrites).