Canonical Url Errors with All-in-One SEO WordPress Plugin
All in One SEO Pack is a very popular wordpress plugin and does some SEO tweaks for optimizing your WordPress blog for higher search engine rankings. But as our pagerank dropped recently, investigation revealed that though there may be many causes for PR drop, some canonical url options might be reducing our google pagerank.
All in One SEO WordPress Plugin & Canonical Urls
Google recently introduced a Canonical url option which allows webmasters and bloggers to specify a canonical url in the HEAD of their html to publicly specify the preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. Which basically means that if your single page is accessed by multiple urls, the canonical url option can help search engines identify and index the url of choice and avoid duplicate content Google penalization issues.
The FAQ reveals its a very powerful atribute to add to web pages.
Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
We have been using the excellent All in One SEO Plugin for quite some while for blog SEO purposes. WP 2.7 has made it super easy to upgrade the plugins in one click and usually we upgrade to new plugin versions without actually looking into the options everytime we upgrade. Big mistake!
Upgraded plugins may check new options by default in the new upgrade, which you might never know without reading the changelog (which how many of us do?).
The recent upgrade of All in One SEO Plugin checked the canonical urls option by default. While this was a good step for a SEO plugin, it possibly reduced our Pagerank. Here is how….
Canonical Urls and Google Pagerank
We host our WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “Archives”. Its easy to host WordPress in an alternative directory. So the canonical url of the front page should be
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/" />
while the hosted blog archives page should be
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/" />
But when I looked into the source code of the main page and the archives page, both show this
which basically means that when search engines visit quickonlinetips.com, the canonical url tells them / redirects them with information that the actual page of choice which we want to index is quickonlinetips.com/archives/ and that creates a whole lot of confusion in the search engines.
Its possibly occurred on our blog because WordPress address and Blog address are the same in the WP admin settings, so maybe the plugin does not recognize the occurence of the new index.php at the root. But I am sure many bloggers out there have not changed the default wordpress settings. Anyways our google pagerank of the main page is now down from PR5 to PR4 and archives page has increased from PR3 to PR4!
Well we have now unchecked the canonical url options in the plugin, changed the index page to be different from the archives page and wait for Google to reindex our content and restore PR is possible. We had already set our preferred domain in Google webmaster tools earlier.
Considering that All in One SEO Plugin is the most popular wordpress plugin ever and is downloaded over 1.3 million time, and many WordPress bloggers host their WordPress files in alternative directories, I believe this is an important issue to address.
WordPress Plugin Lessons
So some humble suggestions for WordPress plugins developers, especially when popular plugins may effect thousands of blogs with one click -
1. Please do NOT check new options as default in upgrades.
2. It would be great if they added changelog link to WP options panel should be mandatory, especially the latest update, so bloggers can check out what are the latest major fixes out there.
It would be great if WordPress codex added a changelog to the individual plugin navigation page by default, so that users know what the latest updates are.
It would be interesting to hear the views of our learned readers, and what else could we be doing wrong to reduce our Google PR.
NOTE: All-in-One SEO Pack is an amazing and highly recommended wordpress plugin. I am not a SEO expert but the canonical url errors may have led to our PR drop, though there are hundreds of other issues that may have led to this Google PR drop, which Google best knows. Anyway it is essential to follow Google Webmaster guidelines always.
Update – I have changed the post title, which was being wrongly interpreted. Note that the plugin did what it was supposed to do and affected our site because WordPress address and Blog address are the same in our WP admin settings. So basically the plugin needs some more options for canonical url settings in with different wordpress settings. Basically those who host WordPress in an alternative directory should check the canonical options and fix them if required.
Update - Mark points to this nice video of Google engineer Matt Cutts explaining the canonical link element and SEO, which would be useful context here.
That’s a pretty big assumption you’re making there. You can’t see your current up to date PageRank, only your toolbar PR, which Google exports once every 3 months or so. As it happens Google just recently updated Toolbar PR, so it’s no surprise you’re seeing changes – however these changes are based on many different factors over the last 3 months or so. The new feature of All in One is only about a week old. It’s very unlikely that it would have had much impact in that small amount of time.
That said, it would seem that people should be careful about this issue if they run WordPress in a subfolder. It may have impact on such sites, so if there’s any doubt, don’t use that feature of the plugin. However, it’s a real stretch to blame All in One for your PageRank drop (not that PageRank matters much any more).
Thanks for all your comments. I have changed the title of the post as it was being misinterpreted. I have also updated why the issue was affecting us.
@Jeffro thanks for pointing out the forum. All points well taken. There is no doubt that Michael has created a very useful plugin and the very fact that it is the most downloaded plugin ever speaks for it.
I hope Michael continues to work on this nice plugin. I apologize if this article offended him or anyone working on this plugin in any way, as it was just meant to help other bloggers like us who host wordpress in alternative directories and might be affected by the canonical url issues.
@Peter – I have clarified in the article that PR drop could be because of hundreds of causes and this is just one more possibility. I have changed the title it was being misinterpreted.
@Stephen – Thanks for all your good points. This was not an attempt to blame the All-in-One plugin for PageRank drop, but just to warn other bloggers about the canonical issue.
@Craig – thanks for pointing that out.
@Davinder – When the WP is hosted in an alternative directory, it would affect only those bloggers whose WordPress address and Blog address are the same in the WP-admin settings. I am sure there will be a new option in the plugin soon letting us set that too.
But my PR increased to 4, I selected canonical url options on ALL IN SEO plugin.