How to fix broken canonical links
How to fix broken canonical links If you don’t know what canonical links are, you can check out our guide below explaining what they are, why we have them, and what they do. Having a broken canonical link is a pretty rare issue especially with WordPress.
It was more common in the olden days when you would code by hand. But with WordPress, since all the backend coding is really kind of done for you by the WordPress platform itself, this is fairly rare.
Let’s talk about what a canonical tag is.
If we look at the front page of our demo site here and then view the source, you’ll find that the canonical tag is just a single line of text in here with a URL. A broken canonical link means that this URL would not be working.
This link would lead to a page that didn’t exist. So most likely what is happening in this situation is you have plugins that are managing your canonical tags. You may have several different plugins or multiple plugins that are trying to manage your canonical tag.
It is possible that you have multiple plugins that are adding canonical tags. And one of them is not working for whatever reason, it may not be updated or it’s conflicting with another plugin, etc.
I would say the first step you want to do is go ahead and look at your active plugins.
The one that we use that would most often be in charge of this sort of stuff would be the all-in-one SEO pack.
If you look at the settings, those canonical URLs are one of the first options here but what you want to do is look at your plugins and look for any of the ones that might mention canonical links, canonical attachments, SEO, permalink, or anything like that.
And if you see multiple plugins that might be doing something like that, look to see which ones you can deactivate or perhaps go into those settings for those plugins and see if there’s a canonical feature and turn it off.
You should only have one plugin that’s going to be managing your canonical tags (hopefully your SEO plugin). Then rerun your audit and see if that issue is persistent or if that takes care of it. If that doesn’t go away, this is something you may need to submit a ticket.
It could be tricky to figure out where that’s coming from. Whereas for an experienced coder or somebody who is familiar with WordPress, it might be a pretty quick fix.
If you are not familiar with canonical tags, it might take you a while to figure out and you might create some additional problems in the process, whereas it should be really quick for us to fix.
And if you are in contact with the person who developed the site, whether it’s on your team or external, you can also ask them as they might be able to take care of it for you or at least point you in the right direction.
Otherwise, it would just be a bit of a riddle and you might kind of feel like you’re chasing your tail in circles.