Canonical for mirror site

On another site
WordPress 5.3.4
Yoast SEO 13.3

Canonical mirror subdomain – it works fine.
screen: https://prnt.sc/u1uq0a
screen: https://prnt.sc/u1uqfl

Hi @luter_88 ,

Sorry to hear about your canonical issue. While not entirely sure how your site (and mirror site) is set up, can you please try resetting the indexables from your mirror site? Please follow the guide below:

1. Install & activate the Yoast Test Helper plugin
2. Go to Tools -> Yoast Test
3. Hit the “Reset indexables & migrations” button
4. Click the “Click here to speed up your site now” button.

This should reindex the indexables table of Yoast SEO and should update the canonicals as well.

Can you please try the aforementioned suggestions and let us know whether this resolves your issue?

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, everything you said to do didn’t help.

But!
Now, on some pages (any pages), the canonical indicated to a different subdomain.
screen: https://prnt.sc/u2c9xq
On other subdomains, canonical can point to completely different subdomains.

In most cases, canonical continues point to main domain.
screen: https://prnt.sc/u2cbq6

on some pages: https://prnt.sc/u2d7fo
or so: https://prnt.sc/u2d811
completely different (unpredictably)

Hi @luter_88,

Thank you for your reply.

Unfortunately, we are still not sure how those mirror sites are created and what the reasoning/need is. Canonicals are based on the Site URL found under Settings → General. If you are not configuring custom canonicals in the advanced tab of the Yoast metabox (you can find out how to do this here: https://yoast.com/help/canonical-urls-in-wordpress-seo/), it would be expected that the canonicals use the domain/ WordPress installation URLs.

The steps that we mentioned earlier, with the Help Tester plugin of ours, is to reset the canonicals and database table to recreate them, this will only rebuild them based on what we explain above.

Here is a specific example:
https://servicecenter.su
WordPress 5.3.4
Yoast SEO 13.3
You can see, canonical works here correctly.

On this site:
https://pochinkin.com/
WordPress 5.5
Yoast SEO 14.8
There was a problem after updating WordPress and Yoast SEO.
In the original html code page, you can see for yourself.

Both sites work exactly the same, the only difference is versions.

in file wp-config.php
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'https://' . $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );
define( 'WP_HOME', 'https://' . $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by luter_88.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by luter_88.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by luter_88.

Find the problem!
Recent version Yoast SEO it doesn’t allow to work dynamically url in canonical.
Yoast SEO saves (caches) url in database phpmyadmin
Here’s the problem: https://prnt.sc/u2s3un

You save url in wp_yoast_indexable -> permalink

That’s why it doesn’t work dynamic url
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'https://' . $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );
define( 'WP_HOME', 'https://' . $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );

How to solve this problem? How to disable saving url to database?

• This reply was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by luter_88.

Hi @luter_88,

Thank you for your reply.

The canonical does get saved from your permalink structure and the Site URL. There is not really a workaround to make this dynamically, we’re afraid. This has been the case before as well, but since the 14.0 indexables release, we store them in wp_yoast_indexable. That is correct.

If you have multiple sites, each on a separate subdomain, we would recommend having a fixed site URL to the specific subdomain and then update the indexables with the Test Helper mentioned before.

A terrible solution is to remove dynamic addresses from WordPress!
You messed up your plugin!
How to be webmasters, who have sites, which work using the dynamic url in WordPress?
Which have several tens thousands of pages?

Many people will be very surprised when they update the plugin to the latest version, and then millions pages will abyss out from Google(((

Hi @luter_88,

Thank you for your reply.

We’re sorry if this doesn’t suit the way you are building these ‘mirror’ sites and subdomains in this very specific setup. However, please know that you can always change how the plugin works to your needs.

You can find more developer documentation about or metadata API and canonicals here: https://developer.yoast.com/customization/apis/metadata-api/ and https://developer.yoast.com/features/seo-tags/canonical-urls/api/.

Why not add the option to disable this operation?
Why do you decide how best for webmasters to create their sites?
Which features of WordPress to use and which ones not?

Hi @luter_88,

Thank you for your reply.

We’ve completely rewritten how we tackle metadata and brought it to our own database tables for multiple reasons mentioned in the 14.0 release post and on our blog, found here: https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-14-0/.

Unfortunately, if you have a custom setup, it might need adjustments. In that case, you are free to change the plugin to fit your needs.

Good luck.

I’m shocked.
Your plugin is used by hundreds of thousands of users, and you should take into account that many of them already have websites that use different features of WordPress. And you do not take this into account, and release an update based not on users, but on your own personal discretion.
If your actions are really aimed at improving SEO, then users need flexibility in setting up, because many people use your plugin, considering how it worked previously.
When creating sites, users rely on how a particular plugin works, and create a site with the expectation that it will continue to work in the future. And at the moment, you have removed the key point that users are counting on.
If in the next version, you will remove title? And then write that we have optimized the work, here is a link to our blog)) Good luck.

Or my English is so bad? that you can’t understand what I mean)