Broken Canonicals on Paginated Post Archives

Beaver Themer
1

Hi,

I’m surprised that no one else has posted this issue — possibly its an issue only affecting our website.

The Yoast Canonical link set on the post categories does not seem to work with Beaver Builder. This is bad for SEO. Paginated canonicals should always point to the base URL, and not each paginated page because this creates bloating of indexed pages and often duplicate content issues.

This is the issue that Beaver Builder is creating right now.

Canonicals matching links exactly and ignoring Yoast Canonicals: (I’ve marked the Canonicals in Bold)
(/category/blog/) /category/blog/
(/category/blog/page/2/) /category/blog/page/2/
(/category/blog/page/3/) /category/blog/page/3/

This is the desired output — all paginated archive pages should have the same canonical link:
(/category/blog/) /category/blog/
(/category/blog/page/2/) /category/blog/
(/category/blog/page/3/) /category/blog/

2

Are you saying this:

<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v13.0 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://bb-test/category/uncategorized/page/2/" />

should be

<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v13.0 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ -->
<link rel="canonical" href="http://bb-test/category/uncategorized/" />
3

The Paginated archive URLs should never have the canonicals with the paginated URL in them. They should always point to the first page of the post category.

All paginated archive pages should always be “/category/uncategorized/” and NOT “/category/uncategorized/page/2/”, “/category/uncategorized/page/3/” etc…

4

Well you better let Yoast know. The site I pasted from has only one plugin active, Yoast using 2020 theme. Activating Beaver Builder url stayed the same.

5

Looks like you can change it manually or via filters

6

I’m well aware that Yoast has the Canonical filter. If you actually read my post correctly, you’ll see that I said this already. The bug is not Yoast, it’s the fact that Beaver Builder is automatically adding Canonicals when it should NEVER do this. So, it would be ideal if the plugin developer who created the problem can fix the problem rather than pinning it on someone else.

7

I am one of the developers and Beaver Builder plugin or theme is not active on my test install, just yoast and 2020 theme.

8

What is Beaver Builder’s logic behind automatically placing canonical links on URLs? I’m curious who decided this, and also why?

9

Even if I use the options that Beaver Builder offers for Paginations:

Numbers,
Scroll,
Load More Button,
None

— the paginated URLs still exist, and then they become Orphaned Pages with canonicals, which is much worse. Hence there is no point at all for these features as they will have a negative impact on SEO.

10

Beaver Builder does not add any canonical links. As I already showed those links are added via Yoast when the Beaver Builder plugin is not even active.

There is only one canonical function in the plugin and that is actually there to disable canonicals on certain pages, like if a post grid in on a static front page or something.

11

Okay, my apologies then… I researched this on yoast, and they did make the change forcing canonicals on paginations. Except, this only affects pages that are set to show the posts, and not the categories…

I disagree with yoast on this since they’ve made many choices in the past that have destroyed website’s SEO, such as their decision to force redirects on any url changes which has caused hundreds or thousands of redirects on URLs with no option to turn it off.

So, the duplicate content penalty is still an issue with Yoast on this subject, but I originally thought it was a Yoast/Beaver Builder conflict as noted on this article https://wordpress.org/support/topic/yoast-beaver-builder-pagination-canonical-issue/

The issue here is that Google still doesn’t understand how to rank only blog articles for keywords, rather than date-organized archives which serve almost no purpose for landing pages. And there is no way to avoid the duplicate meta descriptions.