Is this causing me to drop in rank?

[NoahsDad]

Today I noticed I was dropping (pretty big jump) for some keywords, so I checked out the source of a page, and noticed that my source code has two canonical urls. One to the home page, and one to the /page-title.

I just changed themes recently, and the dropped happened after I changed themes.

Is this what's causing me to drop in rank for certain terms? You can view the source here:

http://noahsdad.com/physical-characteristics/

[Naghirniac]

Usually when you change themes you can have a temporary drop down, this is normal.

Please, read this Q&A there is a very good answer from EGOL: http://www.seomoz.org/q/seo-template-for-new-website

[NoahsDad]

Thanks for the reply, but in this case I don't think that would apply.

What's happening is the them is putting 2 canonical urls into each post. The url of the current page, and the home page. So google is getting confused. Trying to fix it now.

[Dr-Pete]

Did you fix it? I'm only seeing one canonical now. That would definitely be bad - if Google picked up the canonical to the home-page, you could collapse a ton of pages into one and effectively knock them out of the index (and, by extension, any ability to rank).

[NoahsDad]

Yes, I caught it. And it did pick up the canonical to the home page...I lost rank on a ton of key words. I'm hoping it gets fixed in the next index.

[Dr-Pete]

You've got the self-referencing canonical tags in place, which is about the best fix - unfortunately, there's no way to "undo" a bad canonical other than put a good canonical in its place. Hopefully, Google only picked up a few and, given the popularity of your site, they'll re-index pretty quickly.

[NoahsDad]

Same here. Thanks.

Hope you are doing well.

[NoahsDad]

@Peter,

I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?

[NoahsDad]

@Peter,

I'm not sure what happened, but for some reason the canonical is missing up again. All of the pages are using my home page as the canonical url again. No idea what is happening. Can you tell what's going on?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm seeing the 2 canonical tags, but unfortunately, there's almost no way to tell from the outside why the top one is being added. It looks like your plug-in is working correctly. This is a WordPress-based site, correct?

[NoahsDad]

yelp. When I first found the problem, I figured out the theme and the plug in were both adding a canonical url, so I took out the function in the theme to add the canonical url. Everything was working when you looked at the post the other day and noticed there was only 1 canonical url. But today I was looking at some code, and noticed it was back to 2 on each one.

What do you suggest looking at / check out?

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert by any means. I'll ping the team.

[NoahsDad]

No problem. Thanks!

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Make sure to check any plugins first. Some themes and plugins offer the option to add any code you like to the head - it sounds like there might be a static canonical tag in a field like this. That would be my first thought - let me know if I can be of assistance in fixing this up.

Thanks,

Carson

[NoahsDad]

Thanks Carson,

It looks like I may have figured it out. I checked out the header.php file and noticed this: . So I just deleted it, and it seems to be working fine.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh - yeah - that definitely doesn't look good. Probably a holdover from the template. You could just comment it out, but dumping it completely is fine, I suspect.

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the canonical in the pages I'm checking (?)

[NoahsDad]

Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again?  When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.

[NoahsDad]

Really? Do you mind clearing your cache and trying again?  When I look I'm seeing just the one (correct) canonical.

[Carson-Ward]

I'm still seeing it as well. When you re-visit header.php now, is the line you deleted still gone?

[Dr-Pete]

Are there any admin settings in your theme itself? You may something built in that's re-adding the tag at a higher level in the code. Could be an admin flag needs to be reset.