Since installing Cloudflare I have had a lot of trouble getting Google to index my site - I keep getting “Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical” errors as Google is selecting the non www as canonical and is VERY slow to recognise the rel=canonical www version. It has been almost a month and only a few pages have been moved to valid.
The other major problem that is related to this is my sitemap - I had 104 URLs discovered in search console - which is the total of 3 categories - pages, posts and portfolios. The suddenly 2 days ago it dropped to 64 URLs. I noticed that only pages and portfolios have been discovered and posts have disappeared - even though posts are on the site map. I have submitted the posts sitemap separately and it was successful. Someone in the Google support community suggested this might have something to do with Cloudflare? Any ideas?
VERY slow to recognise the rel-canonical www version
Assuming you’re sure you actually have a rel=canonical in your html head, the only thing I could think would cause this would be low traffic to your site (Google prioritizes the top x million sites for crawling, but will eventually get to the lower-traffic sites)
As for the sitemap issue, unless google says it has an issue with fetching that page CF wouldn’t cause anything to happen to the contents of the sitemap. Maybe try a fetch as google on the sitemap to see what it turns up in case it returns a different sitemap for Google compared to yourself.
Thank you for your help. I definitely have Rel=Canonical - I use Yoast so I got them to double check and it is all good.
I have the redirect inplace to www.
65 of my 104 URLs have been indexed - but there is still another 35 URLs not indexed. I am not sure why Google has only partially indexed my site and why it is ignoring my rel=can
Nothing has actually happened to the sitemap - it is working as it should - it is just when I submit it to Google - as e.g. https://www.mysite.com.au/sitemap.xml Google marks it successful but only 64 pages instead of 104. Then when you click on the sitemap link in Search Console to expand the view and show smaller sitemaps contained - only sitemap-pages & sitemap-portfolio are shown. There should also be sitemap-posts but it is missing.
I have consulted Google forum, Cloudflare tech support, this community, My hosting provider, Yoast - no one can explain what has occured to give this result.
