[theme-reviewers] Proposal for new guideline

[Emil Uzelac]

What would you propose gudelines says about this?
On Mar 6, 2012 4:24 PM, "Chip Bennett" <chip at chipbennett.net> 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> 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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