SOLVED: Canonical tags hurting SEO?

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.

cagatay

Why i do not receive such a warning?

NodeHam

I don't know why some would not get those warnings. I have to find time to dig into this deeper. I've simply not had enough time but I will at some point. I'm hoping it's me not reading what I'm seeing correctly but I do still get the warnings from Bing every week.

NodeHam

I'm still getting those and have not had any time to spend on it.
However, out of the blue, I got this from Google;

Q&A structured data issues detected in https://support.abc.com/

To the owner of https://support.abc.com/:

Search Console has identified that your site is affected by 2 Q&A structured data issue(s). The following issues were found on your site.

Top non-critical issues‡

Missing field "url" (in "mainEntity.suggestedAnswer.author")

Missing field "url" (in "mainEntity.author")

‡Non-critical issues are suggestions for improvement, but do not prevent the page or feature from appearing on Google. Some of these issues can affect your appearance on Search; some might be reclassified as critical issues in the future.

We recommend that you fix these issues when possible to enable the best experience and coverage in Google Search.

Most of the notices received don't seem to be things we can even change in the forums, they seem to be at the code level.

Anyhow, thought I'd share and I'm still running 3.4.3, I'll try to upgrade today.

julian

@NodeHam This is likely related to the changes Google pushed last week (which also is related to the structured data changes I posted about last week.

The fixes for the next minor version will resolve these warnings.

NodeHam

I didn't see that post but thought I should share it.
All good then, thanks for letting me know.

julian

@NodeHam no problem, I don't expect everybody to read everything I write

oplik0

@NodeHam This is actually a small separate issue with json+ld metadata generated by question-and-answer plugin. I just submitted a fix here: https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-question-and-answer/pull/102
edit: it's merged now, version 1.2.5 of the plugin should resolve this issue