(Contents copied with permission from a private GitHub issue.)
I'm going to mark this as DONE, I think we've done all we can do, and it looks like we're progressing positively.
Here's my last look at metrics:
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Almost 90% of pages in the 7.19 sitemap are indexed! And improving. 🎉
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"Google chose different canonical than user" pages are higher than we'd like them, but this number (239 currently) significantly exceeds the number of pages not indexed from the 7.19 sitemap. Even if most of those issues were gone, they would likely not affect the number of pages indexed. The trend here is also currently positive -- though I wouldn't be surprised if this spike & fade pattern reoccurs over time.
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"Alternate page with proper canonical tag" pages has only been fading since the last report. This seems to be going well.
Overall I expect us to never reach perfection, but I'm happy with the trends, and I don't think there's any change we would want to make. I think we just need to accept that we can't 100% control Google's search results.