Incorrect Canonical URLs on Multilingual Site

Hello Jonas,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention! I’m sorry that our plugin caused a problem on your site. A bug report has been created and is under review by our product team.

Workaround
At this time, there is no known workaround.

What’s next?
Our product team will assess the severity of the issue and assign a priority level to the report. Our developers work on the highest priority issues first. We cannot give you an estimate of when they’ll start working on the issue.

If you have any further information that may affect the prioritization or help our development team solve this bug, please leave a comment or subscribe to the GitHub report to get updates on the issue.

https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/15141

Thanks for the update. I see that this bug has been known since 2020 and yet remains unresolved!

This is a serious bug that can impact the indexation of web pages by Google. As such the issue is severe. I don’t know how many multilingual websites Yoast is installed on, but I am guessing it’s a lot since this issue does not seem to affect the interplay with any single translation plugin but rather with all of them.

What is the reasoning behind marking this issue’s severity as minor on Github? Because that seems to be why this has still not been resolved since 2020.

To put this into perspective, my last scan of one of my client’s multilingual sites shows this impacting over 130 pages. Any issue affecting indexation of that many pages must be marked severe and prioritized.

Unless there’s a good reason for your product team deciding otherwise or unless they are ready to make this a priority to resolve then I will likely need to look at migrating my client’s multilingual sites to another SEO plugin because this is too much harm caused by this bug to wait an indeterminable amount of time for you to address.

Please advise.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Jonas.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Jonas.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Jonas.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Jonas.

I am not sure why, but this filter mentioned by a user on the github thread seems to have resolved the issue. Much like the user who provided it I am also not sure why it works because I would expect it to strip canonicals out entirely, but it just seems to fix them. So for now we are implementing this as a fix but I sincerely hope that your team looks into resolving this issue properly.

add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', '__return_false' ); 

@maybellyne

Unfortunately this issue is ever further reaching. Yoast also inserts incorrect URLs into the OG URL and application/ld+json markup. As such this issue is even more severe than it first seemed.