How to Fix Multiple Canonical URLs
How to Fix Multiple Canonical URLs So if you want to know what canonical URLs are, you can check out our guide, below explains what they are, why they’re used, etc, in this case, we just have the error message that there we have more than one on a page and this is fairly rare. If you have this issue, it’s important, you do want to fix it and I’ll just very quickly show you what a canonical URL is.
If we’re looking at a this is our demo site. So if we’re looking at the, at the front end here, we would go to the source.
And the canonical URL is just going to be one line of code in the head of the source code.
That’s what it looks like. So it’s very unlikely that you are, anyone would go in and manually insert more than one of these for a single page.
And then with WordPress, that would be almost impossible. So what’s likely happening is you have plugins that are doing this.
So if you go to your dashboard and scroll down to plugins, if I were to do, if I were to try to add a new plugin and just do a search for canonical, just to see what plugins are out there that might be adding a canonical tag, there’s a bunch of them.
So it’s fairly likely that you have, more than one plugin adding these canonical URLs. So in this case, you just got to find out which plugins you are using that are adding these and, most likely, disable the feature that adds canonical tags for one of them, or just deactivate the plugin depending on the plugin and what it’s doing.
For example, we use an all-in-one SEO pack. If we go ahead and just look at their general settings, those canonical URLs are one of the first options.
So if I, had this issue on my side, I would probably uncheck that, update the options and then run the scan again.
Hopefully, that would reduce the number. So we only have one canonical tag per URL. Now, a quick note about, plugins.
I like to do as much as I possibly can with the all-in-one SEO pack, rather than installing multiple plugins that do additional things and I encourage you, to do the same, always try to minimize the number of plugins that you are using.
So if you’re using the all-in-one and then you’re using something else that creates canonical tags, get rid of them, of the plugin that simply creates canonical tags and just use that feature in the all-in-one so that you’re always using the fewest number of plugins that you can, because that’s going to just slow down your site.
And page speed is a, is a ranking factor. So, that using more plugins means you’re going to lose rankings.
So check your plugins, look to see which ones might be creating canonical tags. And if you don’t need them, if they’re not crucial for some other function, deactivate them, or at least turn off the function, where you’re adding multiple canonical texts.