competitor ranking with canonical redirect

[serpnames]

Hi, I have a competitor who was originally ranking with their homepage. After a recent Google update, their homepage disappeared from the rankings. The next day, they started ranking again with the same content, but this time on an inner page (/new) that had a canonical tag set.

I checked their sitemap and only saw the new inner page listed—there was no mention of the homepage. When I searched using site:innerpage, it showed that the inner page was deindexed, yet that exact inner page is still ranking at the top for the target keyword.

I tried a similar setup myself, but Google didn’t select my inner page via the canonical tag, nor did it rank it.

How is my competitor ranking with a deindexed inner page that has a canonical tag, and how did it happen so fast—in just one day? Please help.

 

[seo crazy]

Google obeys clear canonical tags and shifts ranking from your homepage to the /new page in just one day. Even if /new shows as deindexed in a site, search, it’s still live and ranking until Google fully updates its index.

 

[serpnames]

Google obeys clear canonical tags and shifts ranking from your homepage to the /new page in just one day. Even if /new shows as deindexed in a site, search, it’s still live and ranking until Google fully updates its index.

How to set clear canonical tags? I also tried doing with rankmath on homepage.

 

[jennykumar]

How is my competitor ranking with a deindexed inner page that has a canonical tag

on /new page did they put canonical tag like https:// example .com/new OR canonical tag to original homepage like https:// example .com/ ?

 

[tazarbm]

Google obeys clear canonical tags and shifts ranking from your homepage to the /new page in just one day. Even if /new shows as deindexed in a site, search, it’s still live and ranking until Google fully updates its index.

you are probably correct (I don't know any better, so I'm not disputing your argument), but... isn't it possible that they're displaying the de-indexed content in an iFrame of a URL that's still indexed? I'm curious whether this is even possible...