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As Alex said I'll be dialing into the Refresh Friday segment tomorrow, but in the meantime wanted to provide an update on what we've learned so far and our next steps here. Obviously really committed to transparency with you guys and you have my and my team's commitment to continue to push here until resolved.

What we've learned so far:

• Not all DDC sites are affected, or all pages for that matter on affected sites. Sporadic in nature, but consistent when it is happening.
• Google only, not happening on Bing or Yahoo
• We're aware of at least one other provider in the dealer website space that this is occurring on too
• Some specific pages seem to be recurring - dealership, financing, sitemap, blog, global incentives, etc.
  
• And the big one: in Google Search Console for the affected sites/pages we're seeing: "Google chose different canonical than user = This URL is marked as canonical for a set of pages, but Google thinks another URL makes a better canonical."

So - long way of saying, for these pages we're telling Google to canonical one page (the real URL), but they're deciding to canonical another.

What we're doing about it:

• After extensive platform and SEO forensics in which nothing in our system indicated we're actually serving Google mixed data, we did uncover a couple places where we can be tighter from a canonical standpoint. These are in progress now and set to release soon (I'll provide another update when I have it):
  • Self-pointing canonicals setup on pages that do not have them
  • Update /sitemap.htm so the canonical & links are static, not relative
• We're also updating a few of the affected sites with more granular schema.org markup and resubmitting to Google manually for re-indexing.
• Finally, we're engaging Google directly as partners. Obviously they won't up the gates to the SEO secret sauce factory, but they have been engaged and are working with us.

Like I said, I'll continue to keep this thread up to date and continue to press on DDC's end. Looking forward to chatting on tomorrow's segment.

Bob