Fix canonical tag on WooCommerce Category pages

Hello,

Thank you for your query and we are so sorry about the trouble this must have caused.

We just looked at the page you shared above to illustrate the issue and we can see that the canonical is self-referencing which is the default in our plugin when the pages are set to be indexed.

If you still have questions about the canonical do let us know.

We are here to help!

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

Rank Math sets a self-referencing canonical URL for pages that are set to index.

Also, it is completely your choice if you want to keep the paginated pages indexed or not. However, it is recommended to noindex them if you have a lot of them as it can exhaust the crawl budget and slow down the indexing of your new posts.

You can follow the steps in this link to set your paginated pages to noindex:
https://rankmath.com/kb/how-to-noindex-paginated-pages/

Moreover, if you want to set them to index and set the first page for the canonical, you may use this filter:

add_filter( 'rank_math/frontend/canonical', function( $canonical ) {
    global $wp;
    $current_slug = home_url( $wp->request );

    if ( is_paged()) {
        $canonical = $current_slug . '/';
    }

    return $canonical;
});

And here’s a guide on how you can add a filter to your website:
https://rankmath.com/kb/filters-hooks-api-developer/

Hope that helps.

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

The Rank Math feature to noindex paginated pages will affect all of your paginations.

If you wanted to set your WooCommerce product category pagination only, then you may need to use this filter instead:

add_filter( 'rank_math/frontend/robots', function( $robots ) {
if ( is_product_category() && is_paged()) {
	$robots['index'] = 'noindex';
	return $robots;
}
return $robots;
});

Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

Yes, all of your paginated pages (if available) will be set to noindex like the sample URLs you have shared.

Regarding the filter, you may use the Code Snippets plugin to apply it to your site.

Here’s the section you can follow for that:
https://rankmath.com/kb/wordpress-hooks-actions-filters/#code-snippets-plugin

Looking forward to helping you.

Hello,

Thank you for your patience.

The product category paginated should be set to noindex with that option.

Please try clearing your website’s cache and check again the robots meta tag.

If the issue still persists, we might need to take a closer look at the settings. Please edit the first post on this ticket and include your WordPress & FTP logins in the designated Sensitive Data section.

Please do take a complete backup of your website before sharing the information with us.

It is completely secure and only our support staff has access to that section. If you want, you can use the below plugin to generate a temporary login URL to your website and share that with us instead:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/temporary-login-without-password/

You can use the above plugin in conjunction with the WP Security Audit Log to monitor what changes our staff might make on your website (if any):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-security-audit-log/

We really look forward to helping you.