Google bug may select unrelated canonical URLs, could impact indexing

Breadcrumb trails on mobile may reflect unrelated URLs.

Chat with SearchBot

Google tweeted Thursday that it may have selected unrelated canonical URLs for some pages and that breadcrumb trails on mobile might show the unrelated URLs.

It also said that, in rare instances, this could prevent proper indexing.

Here’s the tweet:

Breadcrumbs show a page’s position in the hierarchy of the site and appear under titles in the search results.

Google did not say whether this latest issue is related to the indexing, Search Console report and News bugs that we’ve witnessed over the last few weeks.

What we can do. Google did not offer any actions for webmasters or SEOs to take. But, if you suspect that your pages are affected, you can view the Google-selected canonical URL by heading to your Search Console and entering your page’s address into the URL Inspection tool.

If there’s a better canonical URL than the one that appears, follow the steps on Google’s duplicate URL help page to suggest a new one.

Why we should care. This is the fourth bug that Google has disclosed in April, and it is still resolving issues with Search Console reports, which has some SEOs frustrated over its general lack of reliability as of late.

Although Google was transparent about the existence of an issue, it has yet to provide more useful, detailed information on how the problem is affecting users. Is the bug resulting in incorrect pages on SERPs? Is it showing the correct pages but linking elsewhere? All of this information could be useful for SEOs and webmasters trying to do some damage control.  


Contributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.


About the author

George Nguyen
Contributor
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, where he manages the Wix SEO Learning Hub. His career is focused on disseminating best practices and reducing misinformation in search. George formerly served as an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic and paid search.

Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.