Canonical vs Yoast: clarification?

  • Resolved chidoti

    (@chidoti)


    6 years, 4 months ago

    Hello!

    1. I was looking for this for years. We have a lot of pdf’s and the url in search engines is a huge problem which is still not resolved. This plugin looks like a blessing.

    2. I am a bit confused by how it should work in correspondence with Yoast Seo setting “redirect attachement URL to the parent post URL”.

    As far as I understand, Yoast Seo does following: a) each file uploaded to wordpress has the file url and a separate “attachement page” url, which is practically a double. b) Yoast Seo makes a redirect, which links the attachement URL to the file URL.

    Canonical plugin does following: it works only with pdf and docs (not with images by some reason), and tells to google that instead of the file at the search engine results page it should link to the post in which the file is embed (at least in my case, we embed the pdf into the parent posts via iframe, but it could be a link from the parent post to the pdf file, for exapmle, for other sites). Thus if a visitor uses google to find the pdf, if we are lucky, google will show a link to the parent post (which is much better for user engagement than raw pdf, besides google analytics). And thus it doesn’t contradict to Yoast Seo as they do parallel functions, being complementary to each other. One deletes the attachements pages and the second one influences the files.

    Could you tell if I am right?

    *Maybe this clarification would be useful in the plugin description as many users like me are dazzled by Yoast descriptions.

    3. Am I right that the reason to use canonical for images is that if the attachement url is redirected to the file, the images are practically “canononical” to the parent post, as it is the place where they have readable by google meta data? Not sure if the link to the “parent” post (named “uploaded to”) in the media library does something practicall in such case, or if does influence somehow?

    Sorry that the question is only partly connected with the plugin functions. You are clearly an expert in the question, and I was trying to find an info about it for such a long time…

    4. Feedback: bulk edit function is very useful, as well as the option to add the links to all media which has the parent ones. Special thanks for that!

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Jake Bohall

    (@jblifestyles)

    Re 1: Yay.. I hope you find it useful!

    Re 2: This plugin does not conflict with Yoast, as it is only setting the canonical header for the file url, and does not impact the “attachment pages”. The output from this plugin is only seen in the headers when a referenced document file url is being requested. This allows you to set the canonical header to be the post URL attached to the pdf or document file (or any url for advanced users).

    The goal here was to assist with encouraging Google to display your post page in results (with analytics, etc.) vs. displaying the pdf file… assuming that the post contains content/etc. of what is referenced in the PDF.

    Re 3: I did not include functionality to canonical an image to a page, as unless the image was a snapshot of an infographic, and the page was the html rendered version, there would not really be a case for this … The canonical tag is to be used when the content of two URLs is the “same” and you want to set a preference for authority/ranking/etc.

    Re 4: I’m glad to hear the new bulk edit functions are helpful!

    Appreciate all the feedback ??

    Thread Starter chidoti

    (@chidoti)

    Thanks a lot Jake! You’ve explained it perfectly clear.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • The topic ‘Canonical vs Yoast: clarification?’ is closed to new replies.