Canonical Help (this is a nightmare)

[sfgmedia]

Hi, We're new to SEO and trying to fix our domain canonical issue. A while back we were misusing the "link canonical" tag such that Google was tracking params (e.g. session ids, tagging ) all as different unique urls. This created a nightmare as now Google thinks there's millions of pages associated with our domain when the reality is really a couple thousand unique links.

Since then, we've tried to fix this by: 1) specifying params to ignore via SEO webmasters 2) properly using the canonical tag.

1. However, I'm still recognizing there's a bunch of outsanding search results that resulted from this mess. Any idea on expectation on when we'd see this cleaned up?

2. I'm also recognizing that google is looking at http://domain.com and https://domain.com as 2 different pages even though we specify to only look at "http://domain.com"  via the link canonical tag. Again, is this just a matter of waiting for Google to update its results? We submitted a site map but it seems like it's taking forever for the results of our site to clear up...

Any help or insight would greatly be appreciated!

[The_Sage]

If you've changed your canonical tag, but Google hasn't updated its index, there's nothing more you can do till you see what effect it has. Wait a few days and post again with your results. If something's out of order, at least we have another data set to compare it to.

[sfgmedia]

Thanks for a response.

What's a 'normal' wait time -- 2 days? 7 days? 14 days? How do I know when to try again?

[The_Sage]

There is no specific, hard set, predefined "time" between crawls that applies to all sites.

It varies, from site to site.

It varies from page to page.

It is based on Popularity.

If your page/site is not popular - then it will take longer till it is crawled again.

From: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!category-topic/webmasters/crawling-indexing--ranking/shtHnKdf_lU

[Linda-Vassily]

What I do when I want to get an idea of how frequently Google crawls a page is I look at when it was last crawled. If the cached date was a long time ago, Google probably doesn't crawl it that often. If it was recently cached, it could mean a more frequent crawl—but it also might be that I just caught it at the right time. So I look at a few similar pages to see if they agree.

(To see when a page was cached, do a search on the URL of the page in question—just put the URL right in the search box. In the results, look next to the green URL in the result which is the page you searched for and there is a little green triangle. Click that, and you will see "cached." Choose that, and it will bring up the version of the page that Google has cached, along with the date it was cached.)

Don't worry too much. Even without your fixes, Google will figure out the situation on its own and start showing a preferred URL anyway. But yes, it is generally a good choice to show yourself in the best light and follow best practices to make things as easy as possible for Google.