Strange URL structure

Try disabling your plugins one by one and see if the issue resolves or not, alternatively you can change to default WordPress theme(tweentysixteen) and then revert back to your theme. Let me know how’s work out for you.

Post your site address

Thanks for your suggestions. Is there any risk to the site by changing themes to WordPress’ default theme and back in terms of SEO/Code/plugin conflict?

Ideally if there is a less invasive way that would be better.

I’ve tried deactivating the plugins one by one that didn’t do it.

Nope, there’s no risk in terms of SEO

Ok it’s the Cloudflare plugin! The only one I didn’t try.

When I deactivate it, everything shows fine. But I need this plugin, any suggestion?

Glad to know that you’ve sorted it out, May be try posting in their support forum – https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/cloudflare

Ok thank you very much ashiq, I will try that next. I actually found an article on cloudflare that talks about them leaving out the http: and how it affects canonicals but I don’t understand it.

article:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/flexible-ssl-wordpress-fixing-mixed-content-errors/

I fixed it! The problem was a setting that was enabled called.
HTTPS Protocol Rewriting: It was turned ON, turned it off and canonical url is now absolute, how it should be. This setting was for SSL which I don’t have.

Glad to hear that ??

@thezeal, keep in mind that it’s not a “fix” because that feature is in fact very useful for sites over HTTPS. In other words when you say that URLs “should be absolute” this is not true and relative resources are in fact becoming more preferred in many cases.

Anyway, glad you figured it out but it’s not usually necessary to change —

@jejani I get your point, the reason I was looking to resolve this in the first place is because
a) my site has been unstable ever since this setting was turned on
b) Google is shortening my URL to a category name that the post is filed under, which is in fact hurting my rankings. I suspect that maybe not having absolute canonical URL’s is confusing Google so it’s choosing a category name and shortening how my URL structure shows? I don’t know why it’s happening even now

Example:
When my post appears in search results as
“domain.com/the-finest-example-domain” (more descriptive and long)
my site ranks high for its keywords

However for some reason it has been showing like this now
“domain.com > example domains” [‘example domains’ is a category that the post is filed under] When this URL structure appears rather than the one above, the rankings are much much lower and thus is a problem for me right now. I’m not sure what is causing this and it’s troubling, that’s why I thought to try this.

Do you or anyone have any idea why this happening?

Thanks

@thezeal,

Your issue is due to Schema code, see here:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/category-url-showing-up-in-google-for-article-instead-of-article-url

@jejani thanks, I have posted my reply to you in that thread.