Can you help me work out which issues to prioritize on a site with duplicate URLs and broken canonicals?

Yes. The fastest way to prioritize a site with duplicate URLs and broken canonicals is to focus on the issues that most directly affect indexing, crawl efficiency, and ranking signals.

Priority order

1) Broken canonicals pointing to the wrong URL

These are usually the most urgent because they can:

• send ranking signals to the wrong page,
• cause Google to index duplicate pages instead of the preferred one,
• waste crawl budget.

Prioritize canonicals that:

• point to a 404/5xx URL,
• point to a redirected URL,
• point to a non-equivalent page,
• are self-referencing incorrectly,
• conflict with other directives like noindex or robots.txt.

2) Duplicate URLs that are indexable and receiving traffic/backlinks

Not all duplicates are equal. Start with duplicates that:

• are already indexed,
• get organic traffic,
• have backlinks,
• rank for important queries.

Examples:

• http vs https
• www vs non-www
• trailing slash vs no trailing slash
• URL parameters creating duplicate content
• case variants
• faceted/filter URLs

These matter most because they can split authority across multiple versions.

3) Pages with conflicting signals

High priority if a page has mixed directives such as:

• canonical says Page A, but redirects to Page B,
• canonical says Page A, but internal links mostly point to Page C,
• canonical target is blocked by robots.txt,
• page is noindexed but canonicalized elsewhere inconsistently.

These create ambiguity and can delay consolidation.

4) Duplicate clusters on important templates

If the problem is widespread, prioritize the templates that generate the most duplicates:

• category pages,
• product pages,
• blog articles,
• search/filter pages,
• pagination.

Fixing one template can resolve hundreds or thousands of URLs.

5) Low-value duplicates with no links/traffic

These are lower priority unless they’re consuming a lot of crawl budget or creating huge URL bloat.

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A practical scoring approach

Use a simple priority score for each issue:

Priority = Indexation risk + Traffic/links value + Scale + Severity of signal conflict

You can score each factor from 1–5:

• Indexation risk: Is Google likely indexing the wrong URL?
• Traffic/links value: Does the URL or cluster have organic value?
• Scale: How many duplicates does this issue affect?
• Severity: Is the canonical broken, inconsistent, or ignored?

Then sort by the highest total.

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Triage rules of thumb

Fix immediately

• Canonical tags pointing to 404s
• Canonicals to redirected pages
• Canonicals that point to irrelevant pages
• Duplicate versions of high-traffic pages with no consistent canonical/redirect setup

Fix next

• Parameter duplicates on important sections
• Internal links pointing to non-preferred versions
• Canonical/redirect mismatches across templates

Fix later

• Low-value duplicates with no traffic, no links, and no indexation
• Edge-case duplicates with minimal crawl impact

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What to check in practice

For each duplicate cluster, collect:

• canonical URL declared
• final URL after redirects
• indexability (noindex, robots blocked, HTTP status)
• number of internal links to each version
• backlinks to each version
• organic traffic/impressions
• whether Google chose a different canonical than yours

Then decide:

• redirect if only one version should exist,
• canonicalize if duplicates must remain accessible,
• noindex if the page should not be indexed,
• improve internal linking so signals consistently point to the preferred URL.

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Best first move

If you need a short answer:
Prioritize broken canonicals on high-value pages first, then duplicate URL clusters that already have traffic or backlinks, then widespread template-level issues.

If you want, I can also help you build a priority matrix or spreadsheet formula to rank the issues sitewide.