How long does it take for canonical tags to work

[SoulSurfer8]

How long on average does it take for a canonical tag to work? Understand that canonicals are just a suggestion, but after adding a canonical tag and submitting the page via Google fetch, assuming Google follows the canonical, would you expect it to work after a day or two or does it take longer?

We added canonicals to old PPC landing pages that are ranking organically, though our new landing pages (which we want to rank organically) are not identical and have a bit more content/features. They are similar though.

Canonicals were added to the old pages (pointing to new pages) and requested indexing via search console. Old pages are still ranking and new pages not so much.

FYI we are unable to 301 old PPC pages due to other non negotiable reasons unfortunately. Thanks.

[SoulSurfer8]

Assuming Google crawls the page, how long do you think it will take before we know whether Google is following canonical tags? By follow I mean whether they are following the signal and ranking the canonical link.

[SoulSurfer8]

We requested crawling on all pages via google fetch.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi SoulSurer8

It all depends on how frequently your pages are crawled by Google. If you search for a page in Google and check when it was last cached then this will give you an indication of how long it may take. Under the result in SERPS there is a green down arrow next to the URL click that and hit cached. (see image attached) This will bring up a page with a date at the top which is the last time that Google cached the page. It will depend on how deep the structure is, so if a page s three clicks down then, of course, it will be indexed less frequently than the home page.

Check a few deep pages and compare them with the home page and you will see that in some cases it has been up to 6 weeks since the last indexing.You can speed this up a little with a Google fetch from Search Console on particular pages but that is the reality.

Regards

Nigel

P6kXBec

[GastonRiera]

Hello there,

In my experience it depends on the case, some cases  took a few days and some other took over 3 weeks.

Remember that there is no guarantee that new page will ocupy the same ranking position because depending on the optimization and page rank, google will rank that page in the position it deserves.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.