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thanks Tammy, I think you are bang on with Google following the new links and then finding the same page. Thanks for your help.

I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position.

My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely?

Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?

Thanks, super helpful! The canonical is only on the first page of the series but clearly we still need rel prev/next. Although I've noticed, from other sites that are using rel prev/next correctly that Google sometimes ignore that too and index a random selection of paginated pages.

Despite having a canonical on page 1 of a series of paginated pages for different topics, Google is indexing several, sometimes many pages in each topic. This is showing up as duplicate page title issues in Moz and Screaming Frog.

Ideally Google would only index the first page in the series. Do we need to use rel="prev" etc rather than a canonical on page 1? How can we make sure Google crawls but doesn't index the rest of the series?

Live blog markup was rolled out to a selected group of publishers last year 2015.  I'm trying to find out whether it has been released to other publishers yet (we are a news site). Not seeing any updates about it anywhere and wondering how I can find out if/when it will be available. This is the latest I can see which is not much help https://developers.google.com/search/pilot/open/live-blogs. Any insider info would be very much appreciated.

Live blog markup was rolled out to a selected group of publishers last year 2015.  I'm trying to find out whether it has been released to other publishers yet (we are a news site). Not seeing any updates about it anywhere and wondering how I can find out if/when it will be available. This is the latest I can see which is not much help https://developers.google.com/search/pilot/open/live-blogs. Any insider info would be very much appreciated.

I'm working on a large scale publishing site. I can increase search rankings almost immediately by improving internal linking to targeted pages, sometimes by 40 positions but after a day or two these same rankings drop down again, not always as low as before but significantly lower than their highest position.

My theory is that the uplift generated by the internal linking is subsequently mitigated by other algorithmic factors relating to content quality or site performance or is this unlikely?

Does anyone else have experience of this phenomenon or any theories?

Despite having a canonical on page 1 of a series of paginated pages for different topics, Google is indexing several, sometimes many pages in each topic. This is showing up as duplicate page title issues in Moz and Screaming Frog.

Ideally Google would only index the first page in the series. Do we need to use rel="prev" etc rather than a canonical on page 1? How can we make sure Google crawls but doesn't index the rest of the series?