The “URL Inspection Tool” will only show you cases where your URLs are canonicalized in relation to other URLs…
It won’t show when external URLs are canonicalized to yours. However, the “Inbound Links” report can.
Changes in signals within the inbound links report in Google Search Console can indicate that external URLs are being canonicalized to your site’s own URLs.
This phenomenon, known as “link inversion,” occurs when Google identifies duplicated content across multiple domains and selects one canonical URL.
As a result, inbound links pointing to external URLs are redirected to a canonical URL, which may or may not be on the original site.
The impact of such “signal shifting” can be significant, as it affects ranking, impressions, and clicks on affected URLs.
Google’s decision on URL canonicalization may change over time, leading to confusion and fluctuations in search results.
To identify this issue, you can use the inbound links report in GSC to check if the target URL receiving the link differs from the expected URL on the site.
However, the process of identifying these shifting signals is manual and incomplete due to limitations in the GSC inbound links report.
The canonical role may also change, causing the original URL to lose positions, with signals being passed to the external URL.
This can affect not only the affected URLs but also other URLs lower on the site that receive internal links from the affected pages.
Understanding the phenomenon of “signal shifting” is crucial for SEO specialists, as it can help explain fluctuations in ranking and search metrics.
