Insights from Google's John Mueller
In the realm of SEO, the impact of URL canonicalization on search rankings is nuanced. Google’s John Mueller clarifies that changing a canonical URL, such as from www to non-www, generally doesn’t affect search rankings significantly.
The Reddit post Mueller was responding to outlined a user issue: ” I joined CloudFlare and set my site up to their CDN. In doing so, I had an issue with ‘too many redirects’ and had to work with my hosting provider to resolve it. Turns out, they fixed that redirect error, but in doing so, they changed my ‘home’ and ‘siteurl’ values in my wp_options table from “https://www.example.com” to “https://example.com” (my site is a WordPress site). This caused my canonical URLs to change on all of my pages and redirected the www URLs of my site to non-www URLs. Before, my site was redirecting the non-www URLs to www URL”
Mueller responded by saying that, for the most part, this wouldn’t be an issue at all:
“This won’t cause problems with search visibility / rankings / indexing: when the canonical URL switches, it just switches. You might see a little blip, but it goes to normal very quickly. At most you’d see it in whatever analytics you use, if you separate out www/non-www usage. The only time it would cause bigger changes is if you switch canonicals to a different domain, and the domains have something different set up (eg country-TLD, removed from search, different crawl settings, etc) – with a www/non-www switch it’s all within the same domain and you should be fine.” – John Mueller
Admittedly, that Mueller does concede that there is some speculation — as the rollout for the Core Update is ongiong
The main thing, as Mueller states, is not so much a ranking issue (since it’ll adjust on it’s own if properly set up), but making sure that your site cannonicals are tracking/counting correctly:
‘If the other page is selected as canonical, it’s still a page on your website, and it’ll be shown like normal. It’s like if your site has a www version and a non-www version, then one of them will be selected as canonical, and the other one will be labeled as “not indexed”. This is expected – search engines wouldn’t want to index both URLs because they’re essentially the same.
This isn’t something you critically need to fix – if it’s another URL from your site, then it’ll just be shown like that. It’s primarily a topic when it comes to your tracking / counting: if a different URL is canonical, it’ll just be counted there.
There are a number of things that go into canonicalization, and it can happen that it’s slightly on the edge – going either this way or that way. Over time, this will settle down.” – John Mueller
Ultimately, Mueller urges users to fall back on their QC checklist adn parse whatever adverse changes they may be seeing. As a rule, he advises that you do so from the perspective of both SEO and Dev:
‘I’d check what Googlebot sees when it renders the page. It might be that these errors don’t prevent any of the content from being shown. It might be that they prevent all content from being shown.
If you see these errors in your browser, you can probably also make that call yourself as a first approximation – are you seeing everything you’re expecting? If so, maybe it’s fine for SEO. *However*, even if it’s fine for SEO, especially if this is a new site, I’d ask that the developers deliver a site that doesn’t have errors. Down the road, you don’t want to constantly be running into the same error and spending mental cycles on trying to guess whether it’s a real issue or not.” – John Mueller
Discussion on Reddit
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