Canonical and 301 Redirects

Hi Megan,

Are you using Yoast SEO (free) or Yoast SEO Premium? We ask as the redirect manager is part of Yoast SEO Premium only, but the www.ads-software.com forums are for support with the free plugin only.

If you’re using Yoast SEO Premium, please follow this page on how to get personal support.

If you are experiencing this issue with Yoast SEO, please send us the URL(s) where you are getting this warning, so that we can check these redirects.

We are looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for responding, MariusG! I do have free Yoast and the another plugin called redirection. I apologize, I thought the redirection was under yoast. I may need to reach out to the redirection plugin support, but just thought I would ask first if you could tell if I need to enter my URL into the Canonical URL field in yoast as well as having the 301 redirect set up?

Here is an examplle of a link on my compnay site redirected from
‘https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/2012-what-a-year-for-philadelphia-workers-comp-law-firm-pearson-koutcher-llp/’

to ‘https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/workers-compensation-blog/2012-what-a-year-for-philadelphia-workers-comp-law-firm-pearson-koutcher-llp/’

But, this is coming up as a canonical error. Do I need to put ‘https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/workers-compensation-blog/2012-what-a-year-for-philadelphia-workers-comp-law-firm-pearson-koutcher-llp/’ in the Canonical URL field in Yoast?
Thank you for your help.
Megan

Hi Megan,

We’ve inspected your URL, the 301 redirect is correct. Also, if a page has both a rel canonical tag and a 301 redirect, search engines will only see the redirect (as they follow the page immediately and do not crawl the page first, to find the rel canonical tag).

In your case, the issue is that https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/workers-compensation-blog/2012-what-a-year-for-philadelphia-workers-comp-law-firm-pearson-koutcher-llp/ has 2 rel canonical tags. This is not related to the 301 redirect from https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/2012-what-a-year-for-philadelphia-workers-comp-law-firm-pearson-koutcher-llp/.

If you check the source of thix page and search for “canonical”, you will find 2 rel canonical tags. This is incorrect, a page should have only one rel canonical tags.

The first rel canonical tag is not generated by Yoast SEO and is causing issues. You can see it here.

If you are using other plugins to create/set rel canonical tags, we recommend to stop doing so (or uninstall those plugins) and use Yoast SEO’s feature to set rel canonical tag instead.

We hope to have cleared things up for you.

Fantastic! This is a huge help. I am on it.
Have a great day.
Megan

Just as an update, it was in my header. I removed: <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.pearsonkoutcherlaw.com/"/> from my header. Problem solved. I think.
Thank you again.