SOLVED: Canonical tags hurting SEO?

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

NodeHam

Thanks for doing that. Updated.

NodeHam

Today, out of the blue, I got this from Google.
Cannot recall if I've seen this before from them.

julian

Yes, got that this morning from them too ...

phenomlab

@julian #meetoo

NodeHam

If it helps, I'll share the actual forum this time otherwise, you're in the blind.

NodeHam

What's interesting is that other than posting, nothing really changes in our forums so it's odd that one report is fine, the next there are warnings.

oplik0

Nice to see they changed this to non-critical

Anyway, this is the actual issue from the structured data update - the changes just weren't released yet (harmony 1.1.102 was the first release with them, but it needs slight changes to NodeBB itself that are still only on develop branch)

NodeHam

I have another project coming up and I thought nodebb might be a good fit but this canonical thing is making me nervous. The site will 100% count on being indexed but if search engines cannot go through all of the pages, there's no point.

Can anyone at all confirm that this is not a problem for them? I mean, someone who is highly experienced with SEO and search engines, not just someone saying 'works for me' :).