SOLVED: Canonical tags hurting SEO?

josef

@phenomlab If you use a security certificate on your server and not due to cloudflare, and allow access to the website only via HTTPS, does this not prevent decryption of the data?

phenomlab

@josef it does, yes - provided you use a trusted certificate body to do. Several people make the same mistake of having a self signed cert on their host and hiding behind the Cloudflare provided cert for security.

This isn't the most secure method and your can't make use of strict mode either to completely secure the channel.

The point of the https protocol is to encrypt by default, although there are numerous strengths, with the minimum accepted standard of 2048 bits.

NodeHam

I didn't know you would even have such an option as hiding behind a CF cert, especially if you aren't caching all of your pages. Never thought of that I guess since we always use full proper SSL certs on all individual servers and sites.

NodeHam

Bing just sent me another update, same as before.
"Large number of pages pointing to the same canonical URL for domain"

<baris>

I don't have any other fixes for this so maybe someone with more SEO knowledge can chime in. Does bing provide a list of urls that have this issue?

brazzerstop

I had a similar problem, Google didn't index my forum due to a canonical link error.

The reason was that in CF I made several A entries for domain names 1.example.com and 2.example.com leading to my forum, somehow Google found out about the second 2.example.com domain and started indexing it along with the main 1.example.com domain, the result of this indexing did not please me.

I removed the A record for the second 2.example.com domain and create redirected from domain 2 to domain 1 instead.

Next, Isent a request to re-index the domain 1 and a week later Google showed the correct results.

NodeHam

SEO is the single most important reason in how we decide on which forums to use.
Still getting warnings about the same thing and I'm updated to the latest. I'm looking for urls that bing is complaining about but it's not listing any.
This is what the dashboard looks like right now;

julian

@NodeHam Is it possible for you to reach out to somebody from the bing team to figure out which URLs they are referring to?

NodeHam

Big companies like that do not usually respond to anything. The only hope would be to post in some bing forums but I'm not knowledgeable enough to express what I'm seeing. I only know that we don't seem to be well indexed by Bing and especially by Google which is hugely more important.

NodeHam

Is anyone else testing these updates and getting any positive results?

phenomlab

@NodeHam I have the latest core, and my seo is in fact improving. Granted, there are some nuances but nothing like the level you are experiencing.

jack frostenson

I just arrived. Does it really work? Since I need to optimize the SEO of a website that I have, I have very little traffic and I want to be able to do something about it, reading the comments I see that it does give results but I would love for someone here to confirm it for me exclusively

julian

@jack-frostenson are you a bot

NodeHam

I just noticed the board was stopped. I'm not sure when it stopped but it was still 3.3.9. I'm still getting notices from Bing. I'll upgrade now and see how this goes.

NodeHam

I'm at the latest update but still Bing keeps sending me the warnings so I'm not sure what's going on anymore.

julian

@NodeHam the same warnings?

NodeHam

Good question and I'm not sure. I just noticed the last email from bing was about another domain so I'll have to check a little closer and report.

NodeHam

Hi, yes, looks like the same warnings. This is the content of the emails they keep sending.

julian

@NodeHam do you have an example of a url from Bing that exhibits this problem?

NodeHam

It's really not obvious on the Bing tool.
I'll try one more thing. It's possible that there was an old url on the net that was redirecting to the top page. Maybe Bing saw that as the same canonical url.

I'll give that a try and see what changes.