[theme-reviewers] Proposal for new guideline

[Chip Bennett]

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> 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> 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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>>> http://lists.wordpress.org/mailman/listinfo/theme-reviewers
>>>
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