[theme-reviewers] Proposal for new guideline

[Angelo Bertolli]

So are theme developers also restricted from using nofollow?  It is
functional.

I don't think theme developers should be restricted from using
rel="canonical" just because some of them may use it wrong, or because
Google treats it a certain way for search results.

On 03/06/2012 05:24 PM, Chip Bennett wrote:
> The criterion for me is Presentational vs Functinoal. I think that
> rel=canonical clearly falls under "Functional", and therefore is Plugin
> territory.
> 
> Chip
> 
> On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Emil Uzelac <emil at themeid.com
> <mailto:emil at themeid.com>> wrote:
> 
>     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
>     <mailto: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
>         <mailto: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
>>         <mailto: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
>>             <http://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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