Index, canonicalized? Not sure

Hi @pablorepe

In order to output the ‘canonical’ tag, it needs to be indexed. If there is a ‘noindex’ tag, then there isn’t much point for a canonical URL because you’re signaling to the search engines that you don’t want it to display in the search results in the first place.

You can learn more about it here – https://developer.yoast.com/features/seo-tags/canonical-urls/functional-specification/

You can still definitely set it to ‘index’ and have a different canonical URL (that still points to page B) – https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/

Hello Michael, nice to meet you.

Thanks for your quick response!

Well, let me recap. Regarding duplicate content, you face a situation like this:

Page A – index, thus self-reference canonical.
Page B – not in the index, thus canonicalized to page A.

It would make sense leaving the index in page B if I was 100% sure that canonical supersedes meta robots. Experience says to me rather not and this is why I am texting you. This situation (index this, canonicalize that) is quite contradictory and with the reports in hand, sometimes harmful for SEO.

Specially when you have to control duplicated content within different domains, where the crawlers seems to performance worse in attributing the original content (probably because they do that in different crawls and it takes longer to them to do it right). This last paragraph contains an opinion more than facts.

Anyway, I understand that there is not a current solution for this within the plugin and I will follow your guidance.

Thanks for confirming me that.

Best regards and have a nice weekend!

Hi,

For Page B, if there is a ‘noindex’ tag, there’s no point for it to have a canonical URL. You would be able to address duplicate content if Page B is indexed and has a canonical URL that points to Page A, signaling that Page A is the original and correct source or URL.

You can learn more about how to address duplicate content here – https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/