There’ve been some alarmist posts on a number of forums recently about the All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin for WordPress causing your page rank to drop.
They were raised because a recent upgrade to the All-in-One introduced a Canonical URL feature, which was activated by default.
This, apparently, has caused some blogs to drop in page rank.
The Canonical URL of a post is the URL that is considered the primary one, and that’s useful because a single post on a WordPress blog can be accessed via a number of different URLs.
It can be accessed via its primary URL or through a number of others related to the various archives in which it will also be classified – date archives, category archives, tag archives etc.
This has long given rise to fears among bloggers about creating duplicate content and being penalised by Google as a result.
However, if you read the SEO guidelines in Google Webmaster’s Tools, you’ll see that Google understands that blogs do this, and takes account of it in its crawling. So no penalty – at least not for duplicate content.
None-the-less, almost every plugin and feature relating to SEO for WordPress blogs gave you the option of ‘noindexing’ your tags, categories and date archives to ‘avoid duplicate content’.
The new Canonical URL feature in the All-in-One-SEO-Pack achieves the same effect, but in a more subtle way.
By assigning the Canonical tag to your post’s primary URL, it tells Google that this is the primary link and the one it should direct searchers to.
So how did this cause a problem?
Well, it appeared to cause a problem for blogs where the WordPress installation is sitting in one directory, for example www.yourdomain.com/wordpress, but the blog address is sitting in another – for example www.yourdomain.com.
This is something that you would usually select when you set up your WordPress installation, and it’s not the default setting. So for this situation to exist you would have to have consciously selected it.
For all blogs where your installation and web addresses are the same – i.e. your WordPress files are sitting in www.yourdomain.com/wordpress and the url through which people access your blog is also www.yourdomain.com/wordpress, you have nothing to worry about.
In fact it will help you with the Search Engines because it gives them the primary URL for each of your articles. Google has said this makes it happy because they no longer have to make this assessment.
They’ve said they will treat the canonical URL as a ‘strong indicator’, although it’s not yet being treated as an instruction.
The reported problems seem to have been caused where the WordPress files and the public URL were in different directories.
In these cases the canonical URL feature in the All-in-One-SEO-Pack apparently gave priority to the URL including the sub-directory in the address – which confused the Google Bots and led to problems.
So, if your WordPress files are sitting in the same directory as your blog address, you have nothing to worry about.
In fact, thanks to Michael Torbert’s upgrade, you have quite a bit to be pleased about.
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Not knowing everything about directories and the blog address I’m really not sure how to check to see what I have. Can you help? I know that I use wordpress for my blogs and I have my own domain name and my own hosting but I’m not sure where the wordpress files are. Thanks
Hi Louis,
The easiest way to check is to go to your Settings>General screen. In that screen the third line says ‘WordPress Address (URL)’ and the fourth line says ‘Blog Address (URL)’.
If the URLs in the boxes to the right of each of those statements are the same that means you have nothing to worry about WRT to Canonical URLs and the All-in-One-SEO pack.
Further – these addresses will be the same unless you specifically changed them when you set up your blog.
Hope that helps..?
Cheers,
Martin.
Thanks for clarifying this, Martin.
I’ve been setting up a new blog in a subdirectory of my main one, but from what you’ve written I can see I won’t have any problems with the plugin..
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You’re welcome!
As long as your blog files are in the same location as your blog address you won’t have any problems. Even if they’re not, you only need to change the canonical url to the correct one to fix them – easy enough! (Just a pain in the Butt when you have lots to change)
An update to the All-in-One was issued this week and this issue may have been addressed – but since my blog files and blog address are in the same location I haven’t been able to verify that yet.
Cheers,
Martin.
Hey Martin,
Thanks for the post. I love the All in one plugin but this was the one thing I was always leery of. I read a few warnings online about this canonical issue. Ironically I have been looking for a solution to canonical problems so may just check the box and see.
Will double check a few places but your post gives me back some confidence in the plugin.
Thanks,
Kevin
You’re welcome,
Cheers,
Martin.
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