SOLVED: Canonical tags hurting SEO?

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' :).

PitaJ

@NodeHam works for me

NodeHam

Of course I set myself up for that

julian

@NodeHam these latest warnings are just that, warnings. You will absolutely not have issues with pages not being indexed.

That said, a lot of SEO depends on proprietary algorithms that we are not privy to. We can only do our best to ensure that the right tags are present, but you, the site owner, have to make sure there is good content to index!

Remember, Google, Bing, Yandex, etc. will never intentionally omit sites just because they don't have "the right tags". There are lots of sites that do absolutely no SEO at all that rank well.

NodeHam

I think this is solved and I'll explain why.
I was doing a little digging and came across this;

These are some of the older posts in the forums. Searching more, I find nothing what so ever.
I even cut/pasted some specific posts.

For example;

"7m outage noted as Internal when it shoud have been Provider"

... and nothing comes up unless I enter the whole title in quotes.

I then tried some others and the same thing happened. Unless I quote them, they never show up BUT that's because of SEO but not in a bad way, in a Goolg way.

The point is, the posts WERE found on Google if I quoted part or full title which means that search engines are in fact indexing the forums.

Do I get a free biscuit or something?

phenomlab

@NodeHam said in Canonical tags hurting SEO:

Do I get a free biscuit or something?

Will these do?

NodeHam

They do look a tad tasty to me right now.

So is it solved? Time to close this beast of a post?

NodeHam

So I close this yesterday and today I get this from Google;

It's kind of odd really because other than posts on the forums, no changes really get made in the settings. Somehow Google just keeps everyone jumping and jumping.