topic Google indexed the canonicalized URL instead of the canonical URL in Content Strategy & SEO

Google indexed the canonicalized URL instead of the canonical URL

mostafahaboba — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 10:44:15 GMT

on my website, I made a canonical for some of the pages that have parameters like:

example.com/blog?id=123 - this is the canonicalized which is indexed on Google.
example.com/blog - this is the canonical which is not indexed on Google.

Questions:

1. that's normal?

2. How to index the canonical URL?

Note: the canonical URLs appear on the Google search console as (Discovered - currently not indexed).

Re: Google indexed the canonicalized URL instead of the canonical URL

alyssamwilie — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:00:47 GMT

If the canonicalized URLs were already indexed before you added the canonical it's going to take some time before they're flushed from Google and attributed to the canonical instead. The "discovered" means Google knows about the page but has not crawled it yet; a page must be crawled before it can be indexed. Indexing times can range from 24 hours to 2 weeks. Search engine optimization never gives instantaneous results, it's a long process.

You can speed up the process (though still not instantaneous) by submitting pages to Google's Fetch as Googlebot feature - https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2011/08/submit-urls-to-google-with-fetch-as

Re: Google indexed the canonicalized URL instead of the canonical URL

mostafahaboba — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:32:17 GMT

Thanks, @alyssamwilie for your useful answer.