Canonical URLs are set to draft page instead of published post

@misterkappa We’re sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue on your site.

Can you confirm you are using WordPress 5.8.1? You can check by clicking on the W in the top left and selecting About. If you need to update, please check with your host provider. Please know that if you are using an older version of WordPress Core you may experience unexpected behavior with Yoast. This guide explains more: https://yoast.com/why-we-dont-support-old-wordpress-versions/

If you update to the most current version of WordPress, does this resolve the issue?

If you have confirmed both WordPress, Yoast SEO, and all of your site’s other plugins and themes are up to date and the problem is still occurring, we would next recommend performing a conflict check. A plugin or theme conflict can sometimes cause functionality problems, errors, or unexpected behavior from the plugin. If you are unfamiliar with checking for conflicts, we have a step by step guide on how to check for conflicts available here: How to check for plugin conflicts.

Test this on your development or staging site, if you have one. If not, we recommend using the?Health Check & Troubleshooting?plugin. This plugin allows you to run a conflict check?without affecting normal visitors to your site.

Can you please confirm you have performed a complete conflict check by disabling other plugins, and resetting the theme to a default such as TwentyTwentyOne and let us know the results?

If you do not feel comfortable to do this yourself or if this does not solve your issue, our Yoast SEO Premium plugin comes with one year of (technical) support.

Hi @devnihil,

First of all thank you very much for the quick answer. To answer your questions:

Yes, we’re using WordPress 5.8.1

We do not have a dev/test environment for testing conflicts, however we will try the Helth check plugin. However I’m not that optimistic as the issues started many months ago and we have always updated both the theme and the installed plugins, but we never noticed any change in this behaviour

Meanwhile, based on some similar issues we found in this forum we launched the SEO Data optimization available in Yoast Seo > Tool. The process progress until we got an error in parsing the response to JSON. You can have a look at the Response by checking the following link: https://pastebin.com/yFPyaEgy

Does these info help to clarify these issues?

Hi @misterkappa

Just to clarify, whenever you publish a post, the canonical URL (and og:URL) output shows as https://website.domain/?p=numerical_article_id instead of the correct URL of https://website.domain/the_most_awesome_website, is this correct? Is this just for your standard posts or pages? Could you provide us with an example URL?

We ask that you test this in troubleshooting mode in the Health Check plugin and only a default WP twentytwenty theme and only the Yoast SEO v17.1 plugin enabled in order to rule out any plugin or theme conflicts.

As for the SEO data optimization error, are you still receiving that particular error? If so, could you reset the indexables and try to re-run and see if it then completes?

1. Install & activate the?Yoast Test Helper plugin
2. Go to Tools > Yoast Test
3. Locate the Yoast SEO section and click on the ‘Reset indexables tables & migrations’Note: this won’t actually erase your SEO data, which is also stored in WordPress’ default tables. It’ll just reset our index (custom tables) for that data.
4. Go to SEO > Tools, and under SEO data, click the “Start SEO data optimization” button to allow Yoast to rescan your?content.

For your site’s health and safety, we recommend creating regular backups of your site and database. This is especially important before installing, updating or removing plugins. Learn more about the benefits of regular backups.

Hi @mikes41720 ,

Yes that’s correct. The issue is related to blog posts and I don’t know if this happens on pages as we do not usually create them. A concrete example is this article https://www.outofbit.it/cose-da-fare-quando-sei-annoiato-internet/, which had https://www.outofbit.it/?p=110155 as canonical. We fixed it by running Yoast Test plugin as described before, however this is becoming unbearable.

We stopped receiving the SEO Data optimization error as we kept pressing the button and the process always resumed optimizing remaining articles: based on the mentioned URLs it appears that the error was due to old articles having some particular Javascript code in them.

@misterkappa

Thanks for the details. We understand running the Yoast Test plugin every time you create a new post to fix the canonical issue isn’t a practical approach. This sounds like a strange and uncomfortable issue.

As we’re not familiar with your setup neither able to replicate it on our test setup, we would request that you try to create a new test post in a Troubleshooting mode and see whether the canonical generate is correct.

We recommend using the Health Check & Troubleshooting plugin. This plugin has a troubleshooting mode, which does not affect normal visitors to your site.

If you’re unfamiliar with checking for conflicts, we’d like to point you to a step-by-step guide that will walk you through the process: How to check for plugin conflicts

Hi,

This thread has been marked as resolved due to lack of activity by original poster.

If you are not the original poster but have a similar issue, please open a new request.