Canonical URL's - Fixed but still negatively impacted

[dgmiles]

I recently noticed that our canonical url's were not set up correctly. The incorrect setup predates me but it could have been in place for close to a year, maybe a bit more. Each of the url's had a "sortby" parameter on all of them. I had our platform provider make the fix and now everything is as it should be.

I do see issues caused by this in Google Webmaster, for instance in the HTML suggestions it's telling me that pages have duplicate title tags when in fact this is the same page but with a variety of url parameters at the end of the url. To me this just highlights that there is a problem and we are being negatively impacted by the previous implementation.

My question is has anyone been in this situation? Is there any way to flush this out or push Google to relook at this?  Or is this a sit and be patient situation.

I'm also slightly curious if Google will at some point look and see that the canonical urls were changed and then throw up a red flag even though they are finally the way they should be.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks,
Dave

[kchandler]

First i would check to see if the update you made to the pages have been recognized by Google. You can do this simply by doing a "site:www.domain.com" search, then view the cached page. If you find that it has not been recognized, you can always resubmit a new xml sitemap to your webmaster tools. In the past i have seen this help speed up the process.

How long ago did you make these updates?

[dgmiles]

Hi Kyle

Thanks for the response. That is a good point regarding the site:www.... search and in fact all of the results used the correct canonical url with the cached versions showing the same corrected format. The last time the sitemap was downloaded was yesterday so maybe my concern shouldn't be that great. What I'm seeing in webmaster tools does include some of the older content with the parameters but if the SERP's are showing updated versions then maybe that will be flushed out. I am just under the impression that if its in Google Webmaster then its part of Googles overall point of view of your site.

The canonical url updates have been fixed for about 3 weeks.

[kchandler]

In the past i have seen conanicals take up to 5-6 weeks. My only other advice is to monitor the amount of indexed queries you have in Google. If you know you started with 100+ and over the past three weeks it has dropped down to 50, then it is slowly taking affect (once again, using the site search). If you see the opposite and you notice no change, then perhaps the tag is still incorrect or some other issue?

I can't promise that all of the queried URLs will become un-indexed but the most important thing is the base page ranks the highest when searching.