Gitea doesn’t include the canonical tag in their pages, leading to a lot of duplicate pages being indexed by Google. Each page being indexed has a different sorting option, or other superflous parameter.

Duplicate without user-selected canonical

These pages aren’t indexed or served on Google

Not sure if having a lot of these errors affects SEO but I’ve noticed a lot of my real pages are being discovered but not indexed by Google.

Search console page getting spammed with duplicate urls

To fix this,

  1. Create a custom/templates/base/ directory under your Gitea installation. In my case it is in /var/lib/gitea/custom/templates/base/.
  2. CD to the base directory and run wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-gitea/gitea/main/templates/base/head.tmpl. Make sure your Gitea is updated to the latest version, or choose the right version instead of the main branch.
  3. Modify head.tmpl: Add this line somewhere in the <head> section:
1

<link rel="canonical" href="{{AppUrl}}{{if $.Link}}{{slice $.Link 1}}{{end}}" />
  1. Restart the gitea service