Indexing and Canonical Issues in Google

There are reports of some weird canonical issues being reported by many users. Apparently, Google is picking random canonicals for some URLs which is resulting in massive ranking drops. Inspecting search console seems to shows URLs are being canonicalized to a completely different article about completely different topics.

Google has not yet confirmed this as a BUG and there has been some massive flux in the SERPs lately. Keep an eye on your traffic folks.

Heads-up: You may have heard some rumblings about indexing issues and canonical problems over the past few days. I had a news publisher reach out to me that has seen 1,300 articles get canonicalized TO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ARTICLES. Here is the top article for the site, nuked: pic.twitter.com/Ry9jSFSfz0

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 26, 2020

I have the same issue with a client. About 1,500 AMP pages dropping in and out of index since last Monday. I do not believe this is a core update but purely something broken on Google's end

— Czar ⚡️ (@LogikSEO) September 26, 2020

Also interesting that the site's Discover traffic was impacted heavily right after the 8/10 indexing problem. This has been reported by other publishers as well. For specific countries (like the US), Discover traffic flatlined after 8/10, which was extremely unusual for the site: pic.twitter.com/VUmKkGWNKV

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 26, 2020

The exact thing is happening to us. We are in Ecommerce pages are getting canonised to completely unrelated pages.

Over half of our traffic gone in 1 day

Do you think this is a bug? pic.twitter.com/PD3N0DNbhG

— Tim Dennis (@TimDenn90365349) September 27, 2020

One of my clients deep category pages is experiencing this issue since Friday. Google selected the canonical of a completely different page (65 inch vs 22 inch), nuked its top spot. Now I will have to dig deeper if this is happening elsewhere and on scale.

— Peter Macinkovic (@inkovic) September 27, 2020