[theme-reviewers] Proposal for new guideline

[Joost de Valk]

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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