Yoast inserted canonical = non-indexable

I think I may have figured this out.

Yoast SEO is inserting link rel=”canonical” in all pages, but (from a small sample) only the home page is non-indexable.

In my WordPress settings I have

Site Address (URL) https://compton.parish.hants.gov.uk
(I need to enter the address here because my site home page is different from my WordPress installation directory).

If I look at the Page Info for the home page, its address is https://compton.parish.hants.gov.uk/

This has a trailing slash while the Site Address and the contents of the link rel=”canonical” have no trailing slash.
I cannot add a trailing slash to the Site Address; if I try, WordPress strips it off.

I think the page is not indexable because the canonical link is different from the page address (no trailing slash).

Unfortunately my WordPress home page is set to display my latest posts.
So there is no post/page that I can edit directly and hence no Yoast metabox where I can override the canonical link.

I installed a code snippet I found on the Yoast section of github which fixed the canonical link in my homepage source code, which now says:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://compton.parish.hants.gov.uk/" />

Good news: the Firefox SEO Doctor addon now reports that the page is indexable.

Unfortunately, Yoast 3.0.3 still complains that

Your homepage cannot be indexed by search engines. This is very bad for SEO and should be fixed.

Adrian, which snippet is that?

function wpseo_canonical_home_url_fix( $canonical_url ) {

// Simply add a trailing slash if it hasn't one
return trailingslashit( $canonical_url );
}
add_filter( 'wpseo_canonical', 'wpseo_canonical_home_url_fix' );

Any more information about where to put that? Please?

in functions.php in your theme folder ??

Here’s the complete info:

https://github.com/Yoast/wordpress-seo/issues/1721

Yoast SEO 3.0.4 is still telling me that

Your homepage cannot be indexed by search engines. This is very bad for SEO and should be fixed.

even though I have applied the fix above and the page is actually indexable.

If (on the WordPress dashboard) I click on “Analyse entire site” it doesn’t do that.
It takes me to a page inviting me to sign up for onPage every time.
This is very annoying if you have already signed up for onPage.
When I do sign on to OnPage, it now tells me that my homepage is “Indexable but Duplicate”.
A lot of pages on my site are identified as causing error 503 – an indication that WordFence throttled access. Evidently onPage does not retry such errors, so the analysis of my site is incomplete.

Looking at the analysis of my homepage, under Mobile, onPage tells me that

The page does not provide any information on the viewport behavior. This can cause a bad user experience on mobile devices. Best practice would be to provide a fully responsive design – but it would be a start, to define via viewport settings how devices should handle your page.

Interesting, because Google PageSpeed Insight tells me, under Mobile

Congratulations! No issues found.
Your page specifies a viewport matching the device’s size, which allows it to render properly on all devices.

Guess whether I believe Google or onPage.

I’ve always spoken very highly of Yoast and installed it on client sites.
But Yoast is now giving misleading answers and, what’s worse, is forcing me to register with another site which is time consuming but still gives incorrect answers.

It’s a mess allright, for us regular folk anyway. Lots of people wondering about this very same thing about onSite, me including. Google indexes my site but it’s just scary to see “your site is not indexable” in any analysis tool and not being able to do a thing about it because the knowhow just isn’t there (in my head).

– Jaakko P?ntinen

Yoast/OnPage saying homepage cannot be indexed. However homepage is appearing in site: and info: searches as well as keyword searches. I dont get it.

Pages do have the link rel=”canonical” tag but so do other websites of mine that aren’t experiencing this issue.