Can someone help me with canonical url issue please

I have a forum website that has been doing nicely for a few years. I hadn't bothered with Google Search Console for a while but decided to set it up again as I wanted to see what the clicks were as was thinking of setting up adsense advertising.

So I set up Google Search console and all looked well. But I have now messed things up and not sure how to fix it. In the inspect url section I kept putting in links from forum threads and it was coming up with this is a duplicate and something about not the canonical url. It was the same url I always use with www.

I did a bit of reading around and it said google takes the info from your forum code as to what you've set so I checked that and it was set to https:// only. Clearly I didn't know what I was doing when I set that forum up!

So I changed it back to www and tried inspect url a few times on a few pages. Something came up saying neither url was the canonical link and nothing is showing as indexed any more. I then worried I might lose my google ranking by changing it to www so changed it back again in the forum code.

So could someone help me sort this out please? Two days later and search console hasn't indexed any pages and is still saying processing - check back later. No other information.

I had already set up the adsense ads and that still hasn't been approved after a few days so I suspect they won't work until the canonical url thing is sorted.

Thanks.

 

Anyone?

 

It seems like there may have been a mix-up with the canonical URL settings in your forum code. It would be beneficial to reach out to a developer or SEO expert for guidance in setting up the correct canonical URLs for your website to make sure it gets properly indexed on Google Search Console. Once this gets sorted out, your Adsense approval should go smoothly. Remember to regularly check the Search Console for any updates on the indexing status.

 

Thank you. So far I have set up a 301 redirect (with some help) from https to www and keeping an eye on search console - it's indexing pages now but not all of them. I'll give it a bit more time.