Is it completely fine to add rel=canonical tag outside the head section?
I ran a website audit and the crawler highlighted the issue to have rel=canonical tag inside the head tag.
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Do you know if the canonical is being set by a plugin or by the theme you are using?– keepkalmCommented Oct 13, 2023 at 14:39
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1 Answer
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls
The following text is highlighted in the official Google documentation:
If you use a CMS, such as WordPress, Wix, or Blogger, you might not be able to edit your HTML directly. Instead, your CMS might have a search engine settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines about the canonical URL. Search for instructions about modifying the
<head>of your page on your CMS (for example, search for "wordpress set the canonical element")
This means that we need to put the codes that I want to notify the Google bot between <head>.
So in this case, your code should be located between codes.
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/url">
</head>
answered Oct 13, 2023 at 10:47
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1It's easy enough to find the code and put it into header.php in whatever theme you are using. I would consider that a temporary fix. It will go away when you update the theme.– keepkalmCommented Oct 13, 2023 at 14:37
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1@keepkalm Yes, you are right, I quoted it because it says add to head.html in this text because it writes a text about where we should add the code in the Google documentation. In fact, they gave another answer in another answer. Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 14:40
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1I think your answer is correct, just wanted to add some context regarding CMS and future updates. Canonical could be set by a plugin also. I run into this all the time with a plugin I use that uses job schema incorrectly, I fix it, left a note for the developer, hope it gets fixed in a future version.– keepkalmCommented Oct 13, 2023 at 14:45
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