What Happens When Google Picks The Wrong Canonical URL ? | CodewithHarsh

What Happens When Google Picks The Wrong Canonical URL with CodewithHarsh?

Google may select a different URL from the URL listed in the canonical tag to display in search results. Here's why this could happen.
Despite your best effort to implement the canonical tag, Google will not always choose the same URL to display in search results. How can this be fixed?

This topic has been addressed by Google Search Advocate John Mueller in a Reddit thread on the Tech SEO forum.

A person asks why Google is displaying the wrong URL in search results, even though they are doing everything possible to indicate which page should be displayed.

Wrong Canonical URL

In addition to the auth tag, this person is using the hreflang tag and sitemap and has the correct settings configured in Google Search Console.

Google continues to display a different URL in search results.

Mueller first explains why Google isn't showing the intended URL and explains what can be done to bring Google to a different page.

Canonical Tags: Why Google is not showing the correct URL with CodewithHarsh?

A canonical tag sends a signal to Google indicating which URL is the right one to show in search results when you have similar content.

In this particular example, Reddit users note that they are dealing with a brand's website that has multiple country code top-level domains (ccTLDs).

For example, instead of displaying brand-name.ca in Canada's search results, Google is displaying brand-name.co.uk instead.
There are several reasons for the rise of e-readers.

Duplicate Content That Leads to Wrong Canonical

A Reddit user believes that the pages of all domains are so different that they cannot be seen as duplicate content. However, Müller informed him otherwise.

Mueller says Google sees pages as duplicates and indexes only one variant in search results, removing the others from its index.

Duplicate Content

“What's happening here is that these pages are pretty much the same overall, so Google de-duplicates them by indexing a canonical version. However, with the hreflang annotation, the correct URL is still shown in search results (at least where the hreflang is recognized, etc.).

It's interesting to learn hreflang, it helps to ensure that the correct URL is shown in some cases.

Page Titles Leading to Wrong Canonical

Mueller noted that the way a Reddit user has their page titles spelled out can be confusing for Google.

When working with a website with more than one ccTLD, Mueller suggests excluding the domain extension from the page title.

“The confusing part here is that your page titles use the company name.TLD. This means that the URL shown is the .com.au version, but the title includes .co. the UK. You can fix this by changing the page title to use only the company name.

How do you fix a problem with the wrong canonical with CodewithHarsh?

There is no easy solution to this. It's not just a matter of adding more tags or changing the page title.

If you want to prevent Google from de-duplicating your pages in search results you need to make the content significantly different.

Muller says in a Reddit thread:-

"If you want to change the indexing/canonicalization here, you have to make sure the pages are significantly different, not just slightly different."

Is this a big problem with CodewithHarsh?

While it can be sad to see Google display the wrong URL in search results, Mueller says it's not an urgent problem.

There's no harm when it comes to search rankings, and Google Search Console reports the same as you would if you had selected the URL of your choice.
“Despite what the Search Console says, the position, impressions, and clicks on these URLs will be fine. They will appear as if the actual URL was also selected as authentic. There's no ranking disadvantage to things getting indexed this way - and there's an advantage to having fewer URLs that need to be crawled and refreshed on your sites (faster inventory updates, etc.).

To be clear, the above statement applies to domain properties owned by you.

If you want Google to index and display your chosen authentic URL, the solution is to make the content different from the page that Google is choosing to display instead.

When it comes to fixing the problem, Muller suggests it may not be worth the effort.

"Given that the search results will be essentially the same, I don't know if this is really meaningful to you - at least it probably won't be an urgent problem to solve."