Tag: seo

Fixing Yoast Broken Organization and Logo Schema

Get your Logo and Organization schema back after a Yoast update.

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Extend Yoast Schema with a New Type

Yoast 11 introduced schema data added by default. If your site already has schema added through your theme then this may break. At the time of writing, the documentation only shows how to extend an existing type (Person), not add a new one. So here I am going to show how to add event data by adding a new piece to the tree.

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Remove Yoast HTML Comments in Version 11.0

If you were previously stripping Yoast HTML comments on your website then there is a good chance that updating to v11.0 will show the new schema data at the top of your website.

The problem is that a widely used snippet for stripping out the comments searched for the string ‘yoast’ and then removed the surrounding comment tags. The new schema data added in V11.0 uses the word ‘yoast’ as a class on the script tag, so the script tags get stripped and the schema data shows at the top of the website.

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Block WordPress Image Uploads by Filename Match

Are you continually telling people to optimise their image filenames before uploading them to a website?

Do staff members keep assuring you that they will optimise their filenames in the future whilst having no intention of doing so?

Have they said “I’ll go back and do it later” rather than taking 2 seconds to do the job properly in the first place?

Then it’s time to start blocking their uploads so you don’t have to check up on them like a child 🙂 Continue reading “Block WordPress Image Uploads by Filename Match” ››

Removing WooCommerce noindex Tags on Account Login Page

If you have a website using WooCommerce and have registered it with the new version of Google Search Console, it’s likely that you will get an email notification about ‘index coverage’ issues for the /my-account/ page (Or your custom url for the same page).

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Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs

In this article, we are going to add a new field to the article editor screen and use the content of the field to output a canonical link in the head of the page on the article view.

At some point, Joomla’s automatically added canonical links were removed as they didn’t work correctly, so this is a manual workaround to put them back. Continue reading “Using Joomla Custom Fields to Add Canonical URLs” ››

How to Remove Joomla’s Canonical Tag Without Hacking the Core

For reasons detailed in an earlier post about why Joomla canonical urls are not implemented correctly it may be that you want to remove them. That’s pretty easy by hacking the core, but safer to unset the tag in your template so the changes don’t get wiped out on an upgrade.

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Permanently Redirect all URL’s to Lowercase

Ideally I like to keep all urls in lowercase, but there are a few things that can lead to your site being indexed with a mixture of upper and lower case characters, which in turn can lead to problems with search engines.

How can this happen? Well, for me it was playing around with Joomla’s sh404sef component and not checking the settings properly. By default it is set to use the case of category and article titles which resulted in some ugly /Joomla/Page-Title type urls. Whilst the component was installed it wasn’t a problem. After removing it (for many reasons) the problems started. When requesting the above url Joomla will serve the page /joomla/page-title and the url in the browser will remain as /Joomla/Page-Title.

If applications do this by default then it only takes a rival company to point several mixed-case links to your site to potentially cause a lot of problems.

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The Problem With Joomla’s Canonical URL Links

Joomla 3 introduced a new feature of canonical url links. There is no way to turn it off in settings, which wouldn’t be a problem if it worked correctly, but unfortunately it doesn’t. It has been plagued by problems since it was introduced and has led to some sites taking a massive hit on visitor numbers after upgrading to J3.

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Using Google’s Data Highlighter Tool

For a while now in Google webmaster tools there has been an option under the ‘optimization’ tab called ‘Data Highlighter’. This is their new attempt at an alternative to structured data (or another way to add it without changing the structure of your pages).

It is essentially a wizard interface to get Google to understand your pages better than they do right now.

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