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#961 – Canonical tag wrong link

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Sunday, 06 September 2015 15:41 UTC

[email protected]

I use sh404sef in combination with Redshop. I think i have traced it down to sh404sef, but not 100% sire if it not Redshop.

Problem :
When i have pages that has a subcategory in the url, then the Canonical tag link doubles the everything between the domain and the last page path.

Correct url :
http://www.xxxx.dk/diverse/easy-clip-elastik
Canonical link in the source code :
http://www.xxxx.dk/diverse/diverse/easy-clip-elastik

Other example :
Correct url:
http://www.xxxx.dk/udsalgsskilte/ophorsudsalg/ophor-alt-nedsat-med/ophor-alt-nedsat-med-20p
Canonical link in the source code :
http://www.xxxx.dk/udsalgsskilte/ophorsudsalg/ophor-alt-nedsat-med/udsalgsskilte/ophorsudsalg/ophor-alt-nedsat-med/ophor-alt-nedsat-med-20p

The strange thing is the visuel Canonical link in the source code looks correct, but when you click on it or spider it, then it of course makes 404 error bacause the reel link is wrong.

Sunday, 06 September 2015 16:12 UTC

[email protected]

2 other things about Canonical tag.

B) Is it correct that if you dont enter a Canonical url in the field (Modify a url popup) then it sets the canonical url for the frontpage?

C) Is it correct that it should delete the Canonical url entered if you delete/ purge urls in url list?

Monday, 07 September 2015 11:41 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

1 - sh404SEF do not set any canonical by itself, except for Joomla com_content regular articles.
Any canonical automatically generated (except on articles pages) are from their respective extensions.

The canonical tag you can enter manually per URL, in the sh404SEF URL manager, are only there to override existing URLs
2 - If I look at your pages right now, I don't see the canonicals that you describe, so I think you're working on it somehow.

B - As seen above, sh404SEF will set a canonical for articles, so this may be what you home page is made of. Be aware also that since Joomla 3, Joomla also sets canonical by itself.

C - No, if you Purge URLs, no meta data is removed. You need to clear the canonical fields that you have entered manually.

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 12:30 UTC

[email protected]

1) Then it must be Redshops canonical system that makes the error.

2) I corrected it. I have now deleted the url and meta from http://www.xxxx.dk/busfolie that is a Joomla 2.5 article.
Now you can see it sets a canonical url = http://www.xxxx.dk/

3) When i deleted the http://www.xxxx.dk/busfolie url in the list, then the canonical meta url also where deleted when the url where recreated.
So it does delete the meta canonical, but not other meta´s (description, title etc)

Monday, 07 September 2015 12:48 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

2/ Yes I can see that it's a wrong canonical. I have little more to say about it than above: don't think sh404SEF creates that one. You can test: set "Enable SEO management" to no under the "SEO" tab of sh404SEF configuration and see what canonical you get.
Be aware that even that test is not 100% sure, because when you do that sh404SEF will not remove anymore the Joomla canonical, so that may add confusion.

3/ Nope, canonical and all meta data are not deleted when you delete a URL. The usual reason you may see them disapear is that there are duplicates. Because meta data are associated with non-sef URL, if a duplicate URL becomes the main URL, it won't have any custom meta data associated with it and so no canonical is shown. But the meta data is still there in the database, and will be used again if the same non-sef is promoted as the main URL.

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 13:49 UTC

[email protected]

2) I can not test it on my J2.5 live site.
So i tested it on my J3.4 testsite and disabled url optimazion and now there is not set a canonical url at all.

3) I have tried to change to all of the 3 duplicates and none of them show the meta. So it seems like i do delete them or do not create the duplicate url again after it has been deleted.

Monday, 07 September 2015 13:52 UTC

wb_weeblr

2) I can not test it on my J2.5 live site.

So i tested it on my J3.4 testsite and disabled url optimazion and now there is not set a canonical url at all.

Yep, so I guess you'll have to see that with RedShop. RedShop has built-in support for sh404sEF, they are making their own URL and meta data plugins.

3/ I can only confirm that canonical and other meta data are not removed from db when a SEF URL is deleted.

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 14:15 UTC

[email protected]

2) The tested url is a Joomla article that you said sh404sef controls.

3) I tested a lot now. It do indeed delete the canonical meta in the database i7jwl_sh404sef_metas when i delete the url.

But it only does that when all other meta is NOT entered (title or description).
So when i enter a meta title then it saves the canonical url meta also after deletion of the url.

Monday, 07 September 2015 14:29 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

3/ That would be a bug then. I can see where it could come from, I'll research locally.

2/ If this is an article, then no, it's not normal to get the home page as the canonical.
Can you provide superadmin access, I'll review article content and settings.

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 14:42 UTC

[email protected]

2) Ok

3) Ok.
You can test on http://www.xxxx.dk/busfolie

http://www.xxxx.dk/administrator
user : xxxx
passw : xxxx

As mentioned you cannot disable sh404sef on this site. So if you need super acces to my j3.4 testsite www.xxxx.dk/tmp/testsite15/ then let me know.

Monday, 07 September 2015 14:52 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

So on the live site, the canonical was "busfolie" and it was set through sh404SEF.
I changed it to "/busfolie", as it's better to have an absolute link (though theoretically, it's exactly the same at least for Google and major search engines).

Then I removed the canonical, and saw that I was indeed getting "/" as the canonical.
I looked around, and the only thing "unusual" is that this is an "uncategorized" category article.

I'm going to test locally see if this alter the canonical computation. If I can reproduce, it's a bug and thus can be fixed. If I can't reproduce, I'll need a backup of the site, or the test site, to install locally and debug.

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 15:14 UTC

[email protected]

Perfect.

I have rewrited some strings in the .htacces, but i wouldnt believe that could related.
.htacces attached.

Let me know if you need any further.

P.s. it is pretty bad SEO to set another canonical url for a importent page right?

Monday, 07 September 2015 15:15 UTC

[email protected]

.htacces as txt file

Monday, 07 September 2015 15:19 UTC

wb_weeblr

Yes, it's pretty bad.
I don't how htaccess could alter the page content really

Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 15:45 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

I cannot reproduce locally: articles in uncategorised categories get the correct canonical. Which is not a surprise as 'uncategorised' is actually just a normal category.

However I noticed you have a system plugin called "canonicalization". It says it ensure acces through one host only, but it may also affect a canonical tag.
I didn't try to disable it, as it's a live site, but can you please test that?

If that's not the plugin, and as I cannot reproduce the problem on another site, the next step will be to get a backup of the site so that I can step through the code and find exactly what extension is causing this.
Akeeba is the preferred format for backup. It doesn't have to be the live site, as long as it's a backup of a site where you can reproduce the problem.
Rgds

Monday, 07 September 2015 16:25 UTC

wb_weeblr

3) I tested a lot now. It do indeed delete the canonical meta in the database i7jwl_sh404sef_metas when i delete the url.

But it only does that when all other meta is NOT entered (title or description).

So when i enter a meta title then it saves the canonical url meta also after deletion of the url.

I also tested that locally, and I can't reproduce either. I tried with current develoment version, as well as with the 4.6.0 that's the current released version, and the canonical does NOT get deleted, even if there are no other meta data. I actually checked the code also to be sure.
There's like a mistery on your site....

Rgds

Tuesday, 08 September 2015 10:06 UTC

[email protected]

I have now tested a lot more and tried disable/ enabling a lot.

I found that it where a conflict between sh404sef and Tag meta component.
http://extensions.joomla.org/extension/tag-meta

After i deleted this then sh404sef cannonical and meta works as expected. It where not enough to disable the component, it had to be deleted.

So i think you have to look into it, because there are provertly others that has both components installed.

Thanks for you input and trouble shooting.

Tuesday, 08 September 2015 10:17 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Thanks for getting back to me on that. Indeed, I'll put a warning on the documentation.
When you say it wasn't enough to disable it, you had to uninstall, how did you disable it? in the "Manage" page?
or did you try to disable its system plugin?

Rgds

Tuesday, 08 September 2015 10:26 UTC

[email protected]

It was not directly in the plugins. It where in the administration list/ Manage page.

Tuesday, 08 September 2015 10:30 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

I don't recommend using this page to disable things. When you disable the component there, for instance, it doesn't disable the other parts of the extension. Tag Meta (just like sh404SEF) has system plugin, and that's what's doing the real work. If you don't disable that, then Tag Meta is still working.

Anyway, thank you for your report and finding out about the real cause of the problem.

Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

Rgds

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.