Good morning, search marketers, another day, another Google bug?
It seems that way anyway. Last week, Google Webmasters said a bug was causing unrelated canonical URLs to be selected for some pages. The impact for site owners is that those unrelated URLs might pop up in breadcrumb trails, which appear under titles in search results on mobile. Worse, "in rare cases, it might prevent proper indexing," said Google.
There's no action to take if you're affected, but you can use the URL inspection tool in GSC to see what Google has selected as the canonical. Google says it's working on fixing the issue.
Speaking of issues, I am hearing a lot of Google Ads practitioners complain about the crawling speed of the new interface. It was supposed to be faster. Google touted this benefit over and over. So what's up? We're going to look into it. If you're seeing slowdowns, please reach out to me on Twitter @ginnymarvin (my DMs are open) or via email gmarvin@thirddoormedia.com.
In his latest SEO for Developers column, our Editor At Large Detlef Johnson discusses the SEO advantages of machine-readable HTML5 semantic markup. Specially-named containers can help search engines and browsers more easily identify how our pages are arranged. For example, <header> (not to be confused with headings) is its own element now, which you can use to describe your page outline. The key advantage, says Detlef, is you can be more descriptive about your pages using HTML5 semantic markup.
Lots more below to start your week off right, including a Pro Tip on using attributes to improve your website's accessibility from Microsoft's Christi Olson.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
