Google Responds to Cross-Domain Canonical De-Indexing Report
Google Search's John Mueller recently responded to a report involving unusual de-indexing, where pages from one website appeared to have been replaced in Google's index by an unrelated domain. The situation raised questions about cross-domain canonical tags , duplicate content signals and what happens when Google encounters unexpected server or application errors while crawling a website. What Is a Cross-Domain Canonical? A canonical tag tells search engines which URL should be considered the preferred version of similar or duplicate content. A cross-domain canonical works in much the same way, except the preferred URL belongs to another domain. For example, a page on example-site.com could contain a canonical pointing to another-site.com . Google treats canonical tags as strong signals rather than absolute instructions . This means Google can choose a different canonical URL when its systems determine that another URL is more appropriate. Cross-domain canonic...