URGENT > SEO ranking jeopardized: very severe canonicalisation bug

#307352
  • Resolved Mantodea

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    I actually have another issue or tremendous bug I found in rankmath.

    I recently installed translatepress WP plugin to translate my website into multiple languages. It creates subdirectories (e.g. xxx.com/de, xxx.com/fr, etc)

    If I look on the code that your plugin generates on the DOM:
    https://ibb.co/6nXR0s3
    I see that your plugin automatically add a wrong canonicalisation to all my subdirectories!
    I first complained about that with translatepress cause I tought it was on their side, but they confirmed that it’s instead on rankmath.
    It seems your plugin is completely misunderstanding the canonicalisation and adding a wrong canonicalisation.

    The image in the above link was obtained doing view-source:https://mistresskym.com/it/
    (see by yourself)
    You see? You set https://mistresskym.com/it/ as the canonical link, but that is completely wrong as explained by google, all SEO experts and yoast:
    https://yoast.com/rel-canonical/#canonical-link-element

    The canonical should be set as such:
    <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://mistresskym.com/”/&gt;
    for that particular page!!!

    What you are doing is to canonicalize the page to itself (which doesn’t make much sense)… rather than signaling google that “/it/ page” is a canonical of the homepage!!!

    I have investigated and this issue is jeopardizing our ranking and our repuation vs. google as you can see here:
    https://ibb.co/M1ttDzP

    So pls fix this asap!!!

    Thanks
    Kind regards

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Jaideep Asrani

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    Thanks for contacting us and sorry for any inconvenience that might have been caused due to that.

    The canonical is being set correctly. If you set the URL of your main homepage as the canonical URL of your translated pages then Google will consider them duplicate content and will not index them in the SERPs.

    The canonical tag is referred to other URLs when the content on your page is duplicate content and you want crawlers to know the URL of the original content. And this doesn’t apply to the translated pages as they have the translated content that is targeted to a specific locale and translation plugins use the hreflang tags to inform search engines about that.

    So if you want your translated pages to get indexed then you don’t need to change the canonical URL and leave it as it is.

    Hope this clarifies your doubts. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

    Mantodea

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    “The canonical tag is referred to other URLs when the content on your page is duplicate content and you want crawlers to know the URL of the original content.”

    I am not sure about this because as a matter of fact the content is the same and google understands very well that is the SAME content but just translated in different languages…

    I have just 1 question for you: pls see the following screenshot from our Google Search Console.
    If you are right, why is google marking all this subdir with your wrong canonical alerting me that that content is:
    “Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical” and EXCLUDED from indexation??!?!

    https://ibb.co/CbS1LGZ

    If you were right I should see as “indexed, valid” and google should index that content on different jeographical areas… but it is not the case, it’s simply talling me that I didn’t selected the proper canonical therefore the content is seen as duplicate and not indexed.

    Jaideep Asrani

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Hello,

    The URL in the screenshot is not accessible and is being redirected to the English version of the page.

    Please check if you have correctly translated the page.

    For the canonical, I can check that the Italian version of your homepage is already indexed in Google Search:

    If you check the canonical then you can see that it has a self-referencing canonical URL and is indexed without any issues:

    So if you want the URLs to be indexed, they should have a self-referencing canonical URL. If the canonical tag points to any other URL, they will not get indexed.

    Hope this helps. Let us know if you need any other assistance.

    Thanks.

    Mantodea

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math free

    Hello,
    thanks for your explanation, we will investigate this issue better, collecting more info.

    For now, I thank you very much for your time

    Kind regards

    Azib Yaqoob

    3 years, 1 month ago

    Rank Math business

    Hello,

    Glad that helped.

    Please feel free to reach out to us again in case you need any other assistance.

    We are here to help.

    Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

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