Google’s canonicalisation troubleshooting doc now names a real timeframe: up to two weeks for duplicate pages to split apart after a content fix. Here’s what that number does and doesn’t cover.
Google has added a concrete number to its canonicalisation guidance, and concrete numbers are rare enough to be worth reading carefully. The documentation now states that after you differentiate two pages Google had treated as duplicates, re-evaluation can take up to two weeks.
What the two weeks covers
The clock starts when Google recrawls the changed pages, not when you deploy. If your pages are crawled every few days, two weeks is a realistic upper bound. If a page is crawled monthly, the fourteen days do not begin until that crawl happens — so the observed wait can be far longer.
- Recrawl of both the canonical and the previously-collapsed duplicate.
- Re-assessment of whether the pages are now meaningfully different.
- Reindexing of the previously-excluded URL under its own canonical.
What it does not cover
It is not a promise that the page will rank once it is indexed separately. Canonicalisation and ranking are different systems. A page can be correctly indexed under its own canonical and still sit on page four, because separating from a duplicate says nothing about whether the content deserves visibility.
It also does not cover cases where Google has chosen a different canonical than the one you declared. That is a signal-strength problem — internal linking, sitemap consistency, hreflang correctness, redirect chains — and no amount of waiting will resolve it.
Practical implications
Make the differentiation substantial. Changing a title tag and a heading is rarely enough. If two pages targeted the same intent with near-identical body content, they need genuinely different purpose, structure and substance — or one of them should be consolidated into the other and redirected.
Then help the recrawl along: request indexing for both URLs, ensure they are in the sitemap with an accurate lastmod, and link to the previously-excluded page from somewhere with regular crawl activity. And set expectations internally — if a stakeholder is refreshing Search Console daily, tell them the number before they start.