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Google Says Near Duplicate URLs With Canonical Still Can Lead To Wrong URL Ranking

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Google Says Near Duplicate URLs With Canonical Still Can Lead To Wrong URL Ranking

There is an interesting thread on Reddit on a topic we touched on here several times, the topic of Google ranking the wrong version of the URL in Google Search. It all stems back to the URLs you want Google to rank being near duplicate to the URL Google ends up ranking.

The person said on Reddit that Google is ranking the wrong domain name on Google Search, he wrote:

We have UK, CA, and AU domains for many years and Google starts to rank our UK domain for brand name search on Google CA & AU since late May. When inspecting urls in GSC, we found that Google chose canonicals cross domains for a lot of our pages, e.g.

https://www.zazzle.com.au/ (Google-selected canonical: https://www.zazzle.co.uk/)

https://www.zazzle.co.uk/c/business+cards (Google-selected canonical: https://www.zazzle.com.au/c/business+cards)

GSC country setting, hreflang tags, canonical urls, sitemaps, etc., all look correct on each domain. The content is also different.

We couldn’t understand why Google is mixing the three domains and we also don’t see the same issue for our NZ domain. Any help would be appreciated.

John Mueller’s answer is very very detailed here and it stems back to previous answers he has given on this topic specific to near duplicate content confusing Google. Heck this is similar advice from Pierre Far in 2012 when he worked at Google.

Here is what John wrote:

Whats happening here is that these pages are overall significantly similar, so that Google de-duplicates them by indexing a canonical version. However, with the hreflang annotations, the correct URL is still shown in the search results (at least where the hreflang is recognized, etc). You can see this if you search for your company name with ?gl=au as a URL parameter (gl= for country, hl= for language), eg:

https://www.google.com/search?q=companyname&gl=au

One confusing part here is that your page titles use compantyname.TLD. This means the URL shown is the .com.au version, but the title includes .co.uk. You can fix that by changing the page titles to just use Companyname.

Another confusing part here is that Search Console generally reports on the canonical URLs. So if you check the performance reports there, it will show you the clicks, impressions, rankings on the .co.uk version, and it will act like the .com.a version is not indexed, or not getting any visibility in Search (while as you can see with the query, it does get shown). Unfortunately the only way to separate that out in Search Console is to filter by country and assume that these saw the correct country URL version. The same thing happens with the Index coverage report in Search Console.

Despite what Search Console says, the position, impressions, and clicks of these URLs will be fine. They will appear the same way as if the actual URL were also selected as canonical. There’s no ranking disadvantage to things being indexed like this — and there’s an advantage of there being fewer URLs that need to be crawled & refreshed across your sites (faster inventory updates, etc).

If you wanted to change the indexing / canonicalization here, you’d have to make sure that the pages are significantly different, not just a bit different. Given that the search results would essentially be the same, I don’t know if that’s really worthwhile for you — at least it probably wouldn’t be an urgent prolem to solve.

How is that for a detailed and super useful response?

Forum discussion at Reddit.

Source: www.seroundtable.com

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Google Core Update Done Followed By Intense Search Volatility, New Structured Data, Google Ads Head Steps Down & 20 Years Covering Search

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Google Core Update Done Followed By Intense Search Volatility, New Structured Data, Google Ads Head Steps Down & 20 Years Covering Search

Google’s November 2023 core update finally finished rolling out this week, and it was the longest core update rollout. Then, a day later, we saw more intense Google search ranking volatility and chatter. Google added new organization structured data and also added a new profile page and discussion forum structured data, both with Search Console and Rich Results test support. Google’s crawl rate setting is going away soon. Google Search Console went down a couple of times this week. Google spoke about the SEO value of bringing back 404 pages for links. Did you see the Google patent for what appears to be SGE? Microsoft is working to bring GPT-4 Turbo to Copilot and Bing Chat. Google Ads won’t allow personalized ads for consumer finance topics in February 2024. Google Local Service Ads has new impression metrics. Google Ads released its Ads API schedule for 2024. Google is testing Gray accepted labels in the search results. Google is testing line separators between sitelinks. Google is testing an interview label for news results. Google local photos is testing hearts and other emotion reactions. Google is testing removing the cache link from the search result listings. Google’s head of search ads, Jerry Dischler, is stepping down after 15 years. And I’ve been covering the search industry and search for 20 years now. And if you want to help sponsor those vlogs, go to patreon.com/barryschwartz. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Sponsored by BruceClay, who has been doing search marketing optimization since 1996 and also has an amazing SEO training platform.

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Generative Summaries For Search Results

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Google Professor Robot

Google has a published patent named “Generative summaries for search results” which is believed to be the patent behind the Search Generative Experience launch we saw earlier this year. This patent was filed on March 20, 2023 and approved on September 26, 2023 under the patent ID US11769017B1.

Juan Gonzalez Villa posted a thread on X breaking it down, which I will embed below so you can read it.

The abstract reads:

At least selectively utilizing a large language model (LLM) in generating a natural language (NL) based summary to be rendered in response to a query. In some implementations, in generating the NL based summary additional content is processed using the LLM. The additional content is in addition to query content of the query itself and, in generating the NL based summary, can be processed using the LLM and along with the query content—or even independent of the query content. Processing the additional content can, for example, mitigate occurrences of the NL based summary including inaccuracies and/or can mitigate occurrences of the NL based summary being over-specified and/or under-specified.

Here are Juan’s posts:

Nice write up Juan!

Forum discussion at X.



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Google Search Ranking Algorithm Volatility Today

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Google Algorithm Update

I am seeing some signs of some big Google Search ranking volatility and shuffling today. The November core update just finished, so Google would say it is not the core update but the November reviews update is still rolling out. Or maybe this new ranking volatility is unrelated to any confirmed update – I don’t know.

Many of the tracking tools spike this morning, which means they are seeing some big ranking volatility this morning. I am also seeing some increased chatter within the SEO community but it is early, so it is limited.

Let’s start with the tools today.

Google Search Volatility Tracking Tools

Semrush:

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SimilarWeb:

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SERPmetrics:

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Advanced Web Rankings:

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Cognitive SEO (seems stalled):

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Accuranker:

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Mozcast (normally updates later today):

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Algoroo:

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SERPstat:

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Wincher:

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So most of the tools are showing big changes in the Google Search results.

SEO Chatter

Here is the chatter I am seeing within the SEO community from this site and WebmasterWorld:

Very slow today…

Some wild Ride traffic-wise started the last hours.
I am getting bursts of traffic for a short period of time that makes the gained
traffic while the core update is running return again.
Appears like a fight of Google core algorithm and other ongoing algorithms is going on
and from time to time, some algorithm fires and activates and takes over
and returns the traffic, while other times, another algorithm takes control and smashes the traffic back to low and renders the Google core algorithm useless.
It’s heavy volatile.

and just as the update finished, the results are shuffled again. It’s so disgusting at this point.

I feel like the “December” update has already begun…

Our UK traffic and conversions plummeted within hours of the update finishing.

Yeah we took a big downturn last week, but thought it was Google Manipulation for Black Friday.

But since the update finished, it feels like our sites are offline, especially today.

What are you all seeing?

Is this the end of the reviews update or something new?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

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