Most SEO problems look scarier in Google Search Console than they really are. Recently, I ran into one of those situations. Google flagged 17 indexing issues across my site:

  • 16 pages marked as “Page with redirect”
  • 1 page flagged as “Duplicate without user-selected canonical”

At first glance, this looked like something I’d need SEO expertise to fix. But a quick debugging session with ClaudeCode showed me it was manageable with a bit of structured troubleshooting.

seo-issues-fixed-by-claude-code

The Background: A Redundant /blog Path

When I first set up my blog, URLs looked like this: blog.suryas.org/blog/[slug]

Later, I cleaned it up to a simpler and more readable format: blog.suryas.org/[slug]

I set up redirects from the old paths to the new ones. Everything seemed fine until Google Search Console started complaining.

Diagnosing the Issues with ClaudeCode

Here’s what we uncovered during the live coding session:

  1. Redirect Warnings – The old /blog URLs still exist in Google’s index, so Search Console reports them as “Page with redirect.”
  2. Canonical Tag Missing – None of my pages had a canonical <link> tag, leaving Google unsure which version of the page was the “source of truth.”
  3. Sitemap Mismatch – The sitemap might still include redirecting URLs.

The Fix Strategy

ClaudeCode mapped out a straightforward plan that didn’t require deep SEO knowledge: Add Canonical URLs - Add <link rel="canonical"> tags to all layouts (Layout.astro, BlogPost.astro) - Ensure each page points to its own preferred URL

Update Sitemap - Verify that only the cleaned-up URLs are included - Resubmit to Google for reindexing

Improve Redirects - Keep the wildcard redirect (/blog/* → /:splat 301) - Add explicit redirects for the most commonly accessed old URLs Re-indexing Request - Submit the updated sitemap in Search Console - Trigger re-indexing for the flagged pages

What more? I have asked it to document the changes, troubleshooting, and best practices for my future reference. Got that!

Claude Code documenting SEO fixes and best practices

Final Reflection

The biggest surprise was how approachable this process turned out to be. I didn’t need to be an SEO expert; I just needed a clear diagnosis and a step-by-step plan.

With ClaudeCode guiding the session, what looked like a technical SEO rabbit hole became a clean set of coding tasks: add canonical tags, adjust the sitemap, confirm redirects, and ask Google to re-crawl.

Google hasn’t finished reprocessing the sitemap yet, but I expect the redirect warnings to disappear soon.