Lost Rankings? Lose PageRank? This might be the culprit…

April 6, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Advice, Wordpress · Comments Off 

Earlier today I was alerted by Quick Online Tips about the latest update to the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. Literally thousands if not millions of WordPress blogs use this plugin and for good reason.  It works well.  But there is something that you need to be aware of with the most recent update to the plugin.

As Quick Online Tips found out, the new update to this plugin, version 1.4.9 now adds the canonical link element (also referred to as the canonical link tag).  But, it might not work the way you would expect it to.

Here’s what was discovered:

We host our WordPress blog in a subdirectory called “Archives”. Its easy tohost 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

wrong canonical url

which basically means that when search engines visitquickonlinetips.com, the canonical url tells them / redirects them with information that the actual page of choice which we want to index  isquickonlinetips.com/archives/and that creates a whole lot of confusion in the search engines.

What they discovered was that the All in One SEO plugin was taking what it felt was the right canonical link tag and assigning it to pages as it saw fit and which at first glance, seems logical.  However, what this did for Quick Online Tips (as well as many other sites I would imagine), was erronously assign the wrong URL.

Just to double check this information, I updated this same plugin on one of my other sites, http://KristineWirth.com just to see how the new update to the All in One SEO Plugin worked.

I currently have my URLs set to the non-www version for this site.

When updating the plugin I noticed that the canonical link element updated to http://KristineWirth.com/ (notice the ending slash).  This URL (with the ending slash) is considered a completely separate URL in the eyes of Google.

So with the new canonical link element added to this plugin, it was telling Google to index my pages with the slash rather than without which could end up hurting my rankings.  (And yours as well).

You can read the earlier post on BoneheadSEO about the canonical link element as well as watch Google’s Matt Cutts explain how it works in a 20-minute long video.

One way to alert Google of the preferred way of indexing the URLs of your site is to add your site to Google’s Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t done so already and under the “Settings” link on the left choose the preferred domain for your site.)  This will tell Google which URL you prefer for your website.

Additionally, Google will also make reference to your sitemap file.  When you add your sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools it will also use this as a reference point.  So if your sitemap file points to http://www.BoneheadSEO.com for example, then Google will know that your preferred URL is with the “www”.

Within the Bonehead SEO Course, I explain how to set up this XML file the right way.

So, if you’re currently using the All in One SEO Plugin on your WordPress blog, and either have or intend on updating it to the new version, I would suggest that after you update the plugin, you go into the settings of the plugin and uncheck the “Canonical URLs” box.

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