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Canonical Tag and WP Version not hiding even after settings are made and saved in SmartCrawl

I have setup to ignore the “Redundant Canonical Tag” warning and have also enabled “Hide Generator Meta Tag” still both the warnings keep on showing up on the site.

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 8:01:08
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  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Jonathan!

    I’ve checked your site and the meta tags seem to be hidden now. Maybe the issue here was that you have page caching enabled and it takes a bit time for the cache to update with new settings. If that’s it, please consider clearing the cache after making similar changes (in Hummingbird->Caching there’s a button “Clear Cache”:wink:.

    Please check and confirm if that’s the case. You may need to force refresh the page too, by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F5 on Windows and Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac.

    best regards,

    Pawel

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Jonathan!

    The canonical link tag is used to set a primary page when you have pages with duplicate or similar content. It may be caused by the excerpts on posts that duplicate the contents of a post.

    As for the empty anchor tags, those are the link tags which usually have the form:

    <a href=“http://example.com/“>Link to example.com</a>

    SmartCrawl has detected that you have some links that have no meaningful content inside the tag and no title attribute. For example the link in the header logo doesn’t have any text attached to it. There’s only the logo image. You can fix that by modifying it to include a title=“Some title” tag, like this:

    <a href=“http://example.com/” title=“Link to some image”><img src=“some_image.jpg” /></a>

    This is just an example. You should look for such links in your theme files and change them to either contain text inside or a meaningful title attribute. I found the one in the header logo.

    The missing URLs in the sitemap are the ones you added manually. From what I can see, those pages don’t exist. SmartCrawl tries to add them to the sitemap, but can’t so it gave you this message.

    Hope this helps!

    Best regards,

    Pawel

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Jonathan!

    Okay, let me check this.

    I see you opened access for another of your sites, so I presume that’s the one you are talking about.

    After going to your site and checking the HTML source of the page, I didn’t find any WP version tags, but I can see WP Bakery generator tag.

    You can remove it by adding the following snippet to the end of your child theme’s functions.php file (can be done via Appearance->Theme editor):

    add_action('wp_head', 'myOverrideBakeryGenerator', 1);
    
function myOverrideBakeryGenerator() {
    
if ( class_exists( 'Vc_Manager' ) ) {
    
remove_action('wp_head', array(visual_composer(), 'addMetaData'));
    
}
    
}

    As for the canonical tags, that’s also related to having the same content in post list page and single post pages. It may be considered by search engines that the same content is duplicated on multiple pages. Using this guide may help in fixing the issue:

    https://yoast.com/duplicate-content/#links

    Best regards,

    Pawel

    • Jonathan
      • A Tiger In Human Form

      Hi, well it's not really just that site, its every site I activated SmarCrawl on & sorry the "guide" was not helpful. Also, the message itself doesnt make it any better.

      Shouldn't those settings fix the issue yet it doesnt…

      Recommendation

      Duplicate content spread across multiple URLs can have a negative impact on your page rank. Using a canonical URL for products or content that is accessible under multiple URLs or websites can allow them to exist without harming your rankings.

      More Info

      Check if your site is using the canonical link tag. The canonical link tag is used to set a primary page when you have pages with duplicate or similar content.

  • Pawel Pela
    • Ex Staff

    Hello Jonathan!

    The settings, especially “Hide redundant canonical tags” is something different from the issue you are facing here.

    “Hide redundant canonical tags” makes sure that you don’t have canonical tags where they are not necessary (single, unpaginated post for example).

    What you are facing is SmartCrawl detecting duplicated content on your site. As I pointed out earlier, the solution here is different. You should make sure that there are no two pages on the site containing the same content. For example – post excerpts being shown and the post content being the same as the excerpt. That’s just an example. SmartCrawl won’t fix this for you, but will notify you that there’s an issue somewhere. It’s up to the site’s author to ensure no duplicate content is present.

    Hope that helps!

    kind regards,

    Pawel