Hello @bloeise
Thanks for reaching out regarding your canonical URLs. Checking the example URL you shared, it uses a self-referencing canonical URL which is the default Yoast setting:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bloeise.nl/en/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/" />
As you mentioned, you didn’t specify a canonical for that post. If your pages don’t use canonical URL tags, search engines can easily get confused by duplicate content on your website. That can hurt your rankings, visibility, and traffic. That’s where Yoast SEO comes in.
Yoast SEO automatically includes a canonical URL tag on all of your pages and templates. The plugin does this for you, everywhere on your site: single posts and pages, homepages, category archives, tag archives, date archives, author archives, etc. That helps Google, Facebook, Pinterest and other platforms to understand exactly how your site is structured. No more duplicate content issues. If you’re not such a techy person, the canonical isn’t easy to wrap your head around. If you want to learn more about why we use self-canonical, please refer to this article.
However, if you want to create a custom canonical URL for the post, you can do so in the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO metabox under the default WordPress content editor.
Hi Maybellyne,
Thanks for the quick response, much appreciated! Only, the issue is somewhat different perhaps than you see it. It maybe the site recognised your browser setting and showed you the English version immediately. You can switch with the language swith in the top right, EN to NL.
To verify:
– The Dutch page is https://bloeise.nl/14-tips-meer-bereik-met-je-bedrijf/
– Canonical is now: https://bloeise.nl/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/, the translated version. It’s not self-referencing. See view-source:https://bloeise.nl/14-tips-meer-bereik-met-je-bedrijf/.
– The English page is https://bloeise.nl/en/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/ (with subfolder /en/ )
– As you noted, the English page has the correct self reffering canonical to https://bloeise.nl/en/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/. See view-source:https://bloeise.nl/en/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/.
So the issue is as you write:
“Yoast SEO automatically includes a canonical URL tag on all of your pages and templates. The plugin does this for you, everywhere on your site: single posts and pages, homepages, category archives, tag archives, date archives, author archives, etc.”
Automatically wrong canonical
It now does this incorrectly for my original Dutch blogs automatically. Yoast is telling Google that the Dutch blog is a duplicate and that the translated blog is the canonical. That is incorrect. The original Dutch blog should point towards itself as canonical, not to the translated page. Since I can’t find any setting in Yoast SEO (or TranslatePress), this seems to be a bug.
I know of the advanced tab of the Yoast SEO metabox under the default WordPress content editor. This shouldn’t be needed for every blog only to make it indexable.
Does this extra explanation helps?
Looking forward hearing from you!
Thomas
Hi @bloeise
Thanks for providing additional information on this.
Upon checking https://bloeise.nl/14-tips-meer-bereik-met-je-bedrijf/, we do see that the canonical URL is showing as:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://bloeise.nl/14-tips-more-reach-with-your-company/" />
You’ve mentioned that you are using TranslatePress. Could you check if you’ve configured everything (including installing the SEO pack add-on) to ensure that Yoast SEO and TranslatePress are working together as expected – https://translatepress.com/yoast-seo-multilingual-tutorial/
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your reply, much appreciated!
To confirm: TranslatePress is correctly configured. The seo add-on is installed. There is no setting in TranslatePress for canonical.
Currently some 427 pages that are now not indexable due to this error. Additionally, because the canonical misses the subfolder /en/, the canonical link doesn’t work.
Thomas
@bloeise
I suspect the current issue with canonical while using TranslatePress is more closely related affected by this bug https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/15141 being reported already.
As mentioned, we’ve created a bug report for this issue. Our product team will assess the severity of this problem and will look into this issue. Please subscribe to the bug report to stay updated on the progress.
We always encourage our users to contribute to our plugin, not just by submitting issues but also by submitting patches. If you (or someone else) decide(s) to write a patch for this issue, we’ll gladly include it after some code review.
Hi Suwash,
Thanks for your reply, good to see Yoast is addressing this bug. With the unpaid version of Yoast, I have received now more support than the paid version of TranslatePress.
Since my website can’t run without traffic and Yoast SEO is integrated by my web builder, I unplugged the paid TranslatePress plugin. Immediately, Yoast SEO gave the right canonical again. See https://bloeise.nl/tips-voor-het-schrijven-van-een-goede-zakelijke-e-mail/ for example, canonical is <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://bloeise.nl/tips-voor-het-schrijven-van-een-goede-zakelijke-e-mail/” />.
Unplugging TranslatePress is the fix, I’ll mark this support topic as resolved. Thanks for all the support.
