(Entry was posted by Simon Fryer on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/29/2015).

Dynamic Duplicates

Question: Has anyone noticed duplicate pages which are managed by canonical link elements appearing in the SERPs over the past month?

I work on a number of e-commerce sites, and noticed dynamic duplicates (such as filtered pages, ones which include path parameters, even http/https variants - generally any ugly pages that should be managed with canonicals) appearing in site:example.com searches. At first I thought it was limited to one site, but I`ve since noticed in on at least 6.

It almost appears that either a) canonicals aren`t working properly as of about a month ago, or b) pages managed by canonicals are showing in the serps but aren`t actually impacting performance.

There have a been a number of updates recently which we suspect might have impacted pages managed by canonicals. I`m keen to see if other people have noticed anything before we go all meta-directivey and start noindexing the lot.

Have you seen anything similar?

Thanks,

Simon

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Simon Fryer: Question: Has anyone noticed duplicate pages which are managed by canonical link elements appearing in the SERPs over the past month? ;

I work on a number of e-commerce sites, and noticed dynamic duplicates (such as filtered pages, ones which include path parameters, even http/https variants - generally any ugly pages that should be managed with canonicals) appearing in site:example.com searches. At first I thought it was limited to one site, but I've since noticed in on at least 6. ;

It almost appears that either a) canonicals aren't working properly as of about a month ago, or b) pages managed by canonicals are showing in the serps but aren't actually impacting performance. ;

There have a been a number of updates recently which we suspect might have impacted pages managed by canonicals. I'm keen to see if other people have noticed anything before we go all meta-directivey and start noindexing the lot. ;

Have you seen anything similar? ;

Thanks,

Simon