# What happens when canonical tags point to 404 pages?

> The canonical target does not provide a valid representative page.

That creates a broken canonical signal.

Fix the implementation so that the canonical points to the intended live representative URL, or make the page itself canonical if appropriate.

At scale, this is often caused by deleted products, CMS migrations or stale templates.

## Sources

- [Google Search Central — Canonicalization](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/canonicalization)

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Answered by Abhinav Krishna (https://www.theseocentral.com/author/abhinav-krishna)
Source: https://www.theseocentral.com/technical-seo-faq/what-happens-when-canonical-tags-point-to-404-pages