{"id":86,"date":"2009-04-06T12:22:01","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T12:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/?p=86"},"modified":"2009-09-23T10:03:06","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T10:03:06","slug":"google-canonical-url-problems-and-link-disappearance-from-serp-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/google-canonical-url-problems-and-link-disappearance-from-serp-s\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Canonical URL Problems (and Link Disappearance from SERP-s)"},"content":{"rendered":"

FINAL UPDATE:<\/strong> this turned out to be a false alarm! do not panic!! self-referential canonical link is fine, and doesn’t cause problems. You can still read the post and comments below to see how I got confused. <\/p>\n


\nAfter solving a problem for a client, I looked into newest release of the WordPress plugin All-in-One-SEO-Pack<\/strong>, and have found a bug in <\/strong>it which caused the same problem that client had on a plain HTML site. It implements incorrectly recently invented Google Canonical link rel attribute, which results in pages being excluded from the index.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/webmasters\/bin\/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394<\/a><\/p>\n

It should not be implemented on the valid pages that you want to have indexed, but only on redirects…<\/p>\n

My prediction is that people’s websites will start disappearing from Google index due to incorrect use of this attribute.<\/p>\n

Although Google claims that ‘Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains…<\/em>‘, (http:\/\/googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com\/2009\/02\/specify-your-canonical.html<\/a>) which may be true for proper implementation, I think they should have foreseen this common problem.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, I bet if you use this tag improperly, you won’t be able to find your pages indexed in Google — pages which have something like this in the HEAD section:<\/p>\n

<link<\/span> rel<\/span>=\"canonical\" <\/span>href<\/span>=\"http:\/\/www.example.com\/my-current-page-being-indexed<\/strong>\/\" <\/span>\/<\/span><\/span>>\r\n<\/pre>\n
or something like this in case its an index.php\/html\/htm… type of page:<\/p>\n
<link<\/span> rel<\/span>=\"canonical\" <\/span>href<\/span>=\"http:\/\/www.example.com\/\" <\/span>\/<\/span><\/span>>\r\n<\/pre>\n
If you do find them, look at cached version, and you will see its an older version of the page you had before you implemented this attribute.<\/p>\n
Update: even this page didn’t get indexed in Google as All-In-One-SEO-Pack is active on this blog. All you can find in Google is the url with anchor text as title, and description surrounding the link on the main blog page. <\/p>\n
Update2: following up on the first comment below from, here is a screenshot:<\/p>\n
\"google-canonical-missing-cache\"<\/a><\/p>\n
UPDATE 3: read the comments below to see what happened when canonical was removed and reintroduced to this blog. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FINAL UPDATE: this turned out to be a false alarm! do not panic!! self-referential canonical link is fine, and doesn’t cause problems. You can still read the post and comments below to see how I got confused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[14,13,15,16,20],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-seo-tips","tag-canonical","tag-google","tag-index","tag-problems","tag-seo-tips"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seolutions.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}