Canonical tags hurting SEO
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I've posted about this before and I'm always told it's not a problem. If it's not a problem, why does Google and now Bing constantly send me emails like this one.
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Canonical tags can be used to help de-dupe URLs for pages with the same or very similar content. Bing has detected that your site is using what appears to be the same canonical URL for a large number of pages that are not the same. This may be indicative of a problem with your HTML template, content publishing system, or site code. You should review the source of your pages and check if the URLs used inside the <link rel="canonical" href="<url>" /> are not accidentally pointing to the same location for all (or too many) pages.
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Not indexed as this page is an alternate version of a canonical page
URL cannot appear on Bing
Discovered on 21 Jun 2023
Last crawl attempted 21 Jun 2023 at 00:43
Crawl allowed? Yes
Page Fetch Successful
Indexing allowed? Yes
Canonical URL:xxx
This page is an alternate version of the similar page which you have specified as canonical version using a <link rel="canonical"> tag. Bing does not index the alternate version.
\No matter what I do, both search engines keep complaining about this and I've no idea how to fix it. We badly need our forums to be properly indexed and we're not seeing that after using nodebb for probably over two years now.
Any thoughts?
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I think there is an issue with multiple page topics and their canonical url.
Google suggests:
Don't use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page in its own canonical URL.
Which we don't do right now AFAIK, each page of a topic has the same canonical url which is set to the first page of the topic.
Some related discussion here https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/1668
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It gets very complicated when you start changing the code. I prefer to not modify the code because then I have to keep track of those changes on updates. We've spent a lot of time trying to get our members to use our forums so they would get indexed. It would be nice to take advantage of that considering how long it takes for forums to get used.
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Thanks so much for the quick update!
For some reason, some files / folders end up being owned by root again. I'm not sure what's causing that because I always use the nodebb user to update etc.
Anyway, it's done now. I asked Bing to re-check one of those links and now it shows as indexed. Wonderful. However, it complains about this now.
I'll try Google next.
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Some of the fixes are as simple as going to settings, posts and changing the values.
Some, not so obvious such as follow;Bing suggestions;
1 Change the description in the <meta description> tag in the page source to be between 25 and 160 characters in length.
2 Ensure that the page source does not contain large amounts of CSS or code at the top of the page. Consider moving code and styles into separate files.
3 The pages uses a meta robots tag. Review the value of the tag to see if you are not unintentionally blocking the page from being indexed (NOINDEX).
Bing seems to like the site better now but Google is still not loving it. I have to work on that next.
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