Starting in July, some sites are seeing an increase in canonical pages errors shown in Google Search Console, with Google choosing different canonical pages than the ones declared by the website. In most cases, Google's chosen canonical pages don't make sense. It does look like this issue has resolved, but I thought it was worth writing about as many may be confused.

Rafa Martin brought the situation to my attention. Many people replied saying they were having the same issue.

It was suggested that a Javascript issue could be causing Google to see the pages differently, but this does not seem to be happening.

Search Console's list of top linked pages is also showing unusual results, with pages having just one internal link being shown with tens of thousands. This suggests Google is incorrectly canonicalizing many pages to the homepage.

The issue is also affecting image and video search, with Google selecting images and videos from the wrongly canonicalized pages rather than more relevant results.

Overall, it appears Google has started incorrectly canonicalizing many pages on the site to the homepage, leading to issues with search performance and relevancy.

He is not the only one with this issue.

https://twitter.com/MelonUsck/status/1696514618015784997?s=20

According to John Mueller this issue affected a small number of sites and "things are settling down now."

https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1698681379683213427?s=20

Rafa indicated on Mastodon that the warnings are now clearing out of GSC and this problem seems to be resolving. I decided to post this regardless as I think a lot of people were confused!