[theme-reviewers] Proposal for new guideline

[Emil Uzelac]

I was reading from my phone....

I agree that Themes should not mess with rel="canonical" at all. Majority
people are devs not SEO consultants. Required not to use is what I believe
we should do.
On Mar 6, 2012 4:17 PM, "Joost de Valk" <joost at yoast.com> wrote:

> It has nothing to do with using my plugin or not. It's something even my
> plugin can't fix :-)
>
> Best,
> Joost
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On 6 mrt. 2012, at 23:14, Emil Uzelac <emil at themeid.com> wrote:
>
> If they do not use your plugin would this hurt the SEO?
> On Mar 6, 2012 3:47 PM, "Joost de Valk" <joost at yoast.com> wrote:
>
>>  Hi all,
>>
>> tldr version: I would like a guideline that tells theme developers to *
>> not* include a rel=canonical link in their theme as it hurts people more
>> than it helps in a lot of cases.
>>
>> long version:
>>
>> As some of you probably know, I do a lot of SEO consultancy. Some of it
>> is related to people who have suddenly lost all their rankings and want me
>> to help fix it for them. Today I helped out a blogger, unpaid because I
>> just liked his blog as it was about children with Down Syndrome.
>>
>> He had recently switched themes *and *started using my WordPress SEO
>> plugin, and of course he was blaming my plugin for his sudden loss of
>> rankings. What I found out though, was that the theme had the following
>> rel=canonical link in the header.php:
>>
>> <link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo home_url(); ?>" />
>>
>> above the call to wp_head. This was causing each individual post to have
>> a canonical point back to the homepage. Now you should know that Google
>> especially sees a canonical as somewhat of a "soft 301 redirect". It
>> basically takes a page that has a canonical pointing elsewhere out of the
>> rankings. The effect is quite dramatic.
>>
>> This was a premium theme, whose authors I have since emailed. It got me
>> thinking though: is this in the WP.org guidelines? Apparently, it's not.
>> WordPress itself adds a rel="canonical" through wp_head on single pages,
>> and there's a patch in Trac to add it on more pages. There are several
>> themes in the repository though that have absolutely 100% wrong canonical
>> links in their header.
>>
>> This one: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/digu is an example. It's
>> not popular and hasn't been updated in ages so I wouldn't normally care too
>> much, but I wanted to use it as an example. It has the following code:
>>
>> <?php if(is_single()){ ?><link rel="canonical" href="<?php echo
>> get_permalink($post->ID),"\n";?>" /><?php }?>
>> <?php if(is_home() || is_tag() || is_category() || is_month() ||
>> is_year()){ ?>
>> <link rel="canonical" href="<?php bloginfo('url');?>" /><?php echo "\n";
>> }?>
>> …. snip ….
>> <?php } ?>
>>
>> Using that theme on a live site could kill your rankings instantly, as it
>> would make all category listings etc have canonicals linking back to the
>> homepage. In most cases this would prevent Google from spidering the links
>> to the posts on those pages.
>>
>> Now some themes, like Thematic and Hybrid, have somewhat more sensible
>> canonical functions, which makes this a hard discussion. I would vote to
>> call it plugin territory though and keep it out of themes completely. Would
>> love to hear your opinions.
>>
>> Best
>> Joost
>>
>>
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