Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Yoast & rel canonical for paginated Wordpress URLs
-
Hello, our Wordpress blog at http://www.jobs.ca/career-resources has a rel canonical issue since we added pagination to the front page and category-pages. We're using Yoast and it's incorrectly applying a rel-canonical meta tag referencing page 1 on page 2, 3, etc. This is a known misuse of the rel-canonical tag (per Google's Webmaster Blog - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html, which says rel-canonical should be replaced with rel-prev and rel-next for page 2, 3, etc.).
We don't see a way to specify anywhere in Yoast's options to correct this behaviour for page 2, 3, etc. Yoast allows you to override a page's canonical URL, otherwise it automatically uses the Wordpress permalink.
My question is, does anyone know how to configure Yoast to properly replace rel-canonical tags with rel-prev and rel-next for paginated URLs, or do I need to look at another plugin or customize the behavior directly in my child theme code?
This issue was brought up here as well: http://moz.com/community/q/canonical-help, but the only response did not relate to Yoast.
(We're using Wordpress 3.6.1 and Yoast "Wordpress SEO" 1.4.18)
-
Thanks for posting this Shaun! People actually do come back and read these months to come and these Q&A's will return in search results, so you've made this a really valuable page for future readers - thanks!
-Dan
-
I've now fixed this issue by refactoring our child theme so the WP queries occur before the header (inserting the content later).
Because we're using a custom homepage template for the front page and a custom "category page" template, I've also had to modify Yoast's "canonical" and "adjacent_rel_links" functions to understand the pagination for those pages (otherwise Yoast simply detects these as "singular" pages and only applies the rel canonical pointing to page 1, regardless of the current page).
I used the following code to allow overriding Yoast in my child-theme's functions.php:
if (defined('WPSEO_VERSION')) {
function custom_wpseo_override() {global $wpseo_front;
remove_action('wpseo_head', array($wpseo_front, 'canonical'), 20);
add_action('wpseo_head', 'custom_wpseo_canonical', 20);
remove_action('wpseo_head', array($wpseo_front, 'adjacent_rel_links'), 21);
add_action('wpseo_head', 'custom_wpseo_adjacent_rel_links', 21);
}
add_action('init','custom_wpseo_override');
} -
Shaun
Great, thanks - happy to help!
-Dan
-
Hi Dan,
Yeah it must me some kind of conflict with the theme or another plugin... We're not using Thesis or Genesis but we have modified header.php in our child theme to replace the masthead markup (just stuff within the body tag). I just noticed the other day that both the theme (ExtraNews by ThemeForest) and Yoast are adding their own <title>tags, so there may be more conflicts than one.</p> <p>Marking your response as an answer because you proved that Yoast can insert the rel next & prev tags and you've helped me get to the point where I'm 80% sure it's a theme conflict. Thanks again!</p></title>
-
Hi Shaun
Yes in terms of keeping strictly to Google's guidelines, I agree that Yoast should in theory use either prev/next or canonical on subpages, but not both.
I am honestly not certain the settings it could be otherwise, as "subpages of archives" is the only one I know of that handles pagination.
Could there be another plugin or your theme (or custom coding in header.php) causing a conflict? One thing you can do is shut off other plugins one by one to diagnose. You can switch themes or switch to the default header.php file included with WordPress, but I (for obvious reasons) do NOT recommend doing that on a live website. I'm not sure if you have a testing environment.
Are you using a framework like Thesis or Genesis? Sometimes those can cause unexpected things to happen as well.
-Dan
-
Hi Dan, and thanks very much for your response.
Per your screenshot, I believe it's not ideal that there's a rel canonical meta-tag pointing to the current partial page (page 2).
From the Google blog link above: "In cases of paginated content, we recommend either a rel=canonical from component pages to a single-page version of the article, or to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” pagination markup."
They mention here https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en (2nd last point) that it's optional to include a rel canonical tag like yours, but without the "Noindex subpages of archives" option enabled, it would probably cause your separate post pages to be indexed, which may or may not be ideal for you depending on how authoritative/complete each individual page's content is.
Yoast is definitely adding the rel prev & next meta-tags for you though, which is exactly what I need (minus the rel canonical). I wonder which exact setting is enabling that for you... We have very few Yoast options enabled/configured at all currently, but I don't see any that are specific to the rel prev & next tags.
I've tried enabling the "Noindex subpages of archives" per your suggestion, but it didn't result in any change in the meta-tags for my site (verified after caches cleared too).
Any other suggestions you have would be great. My colleagues want to keep Yoast for it's other features, so I may go the route of forking/modifying the Yoast plugin code to fit our situation if needed.
Thanks for your time!
-
Hi Shaun
Dan here, one of the Moz Associates - we're very sorry for the delay!
I've attached a screenshot of my own personal company site which uses the Yoast Plugin - just want to verify the code as seen here is what I would consider "correct" and best practice for WordPress pagination.
That code has not require any custom coding or anything. So either we need to get the Yoast settings correct, or something else may be interfering with Yoast.
Please first try going to: Yoast SEO->Titles/Meta and select "Noindex subpages of archives". This to my knowledge is the only setting that needs to be made to handle pagination correctly.
Let us know if that works - and again, apologies for the delay. Sometimes we have quite a backlog and don't pick up right away if the community has not appropriately answered a question.
Thanks!
-Dan
-
Do the 30+ people who've viewed this question think it answered itself? I tried to be thorough, but was it too much to read? Or... Is this not a great place to ask such a question?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Canonical and Alternate Advice
At the moment for most of our sites, we have both a desktop and mobile version of our sites. They both show the same content and use the same URL structure as each other. The server determines whether if you're visiting from either device and displays the relevant version of the site. We are in a predicament of how to properly use the canonical and alternate rel tags. Currently we have a canonical on mobile and alternate on desktop, both of which have the same URL because both mobile and desktop use the same as explained in the first paragraph. Would the way of us doing it at the moment be correct?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JH_OffLimits3 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Do I need to use rel="canonical" on pages with no external links?
I know having rel="canonical" for each page on my website is not a bad practice... but how necessary is it for pages that don't have any external links pointing to them? I have my own opinions on this, to be fair - but I'd love to get a consensus before I start trying to customize which URLs have/don't have it included. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Netrepid0 -
Is it ok to use both 301 redirect and rel="canonical' at the same time?
Hi everyone, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I just wasn't able to find a response in previous questions. To fix the problems in our website regarding duplication I have the possibility to set up 301's and, at the same time, modify our CMS so that it automatically sets a rel="canonical" tag for every page that is generated. Would it be a problem to have both methods set up? Is it a problem to have a on a page that is redirecting to another one? Is it advisable to have a rel="canonical" tag on every single page? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SDLOnlineChannel0 -
Canonical & noindex? Use together
For duplicate pages created by the "print" function, seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not) and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Url with hypen or.co?
Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)? Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joechicago0